Marc Piasecki
People are strange when it comes to their obsession with celebrity, but a Paris cemetery is hoping the most dedicated of fans are willing to pay handsomely to be buried near their idols.
The Pere Lachaise cemetery is the final resting place of some of history and pop culture's biggest names, including Jim Morrison of The Doors, writer Oscar Wilde, Marcel Marceau, and Frédéric Chopin. Now the body that oversees that graveyard is offering people the chance to have a plot of their own there — or other historic French cemeteries, including Montparnasse (which counts Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Chirac among its residents) and Montmartre (which houses the remains of impressionist painter Edgar Degas and Charles-Henri Sanson, the royal executioner who executed Louis XVI).
Thirty gravestones from the cemeteries are in disrepair and can be bought for €4,000 (roughly $4,500). Whoever buys them, however, must restore the monuments and then buy the burial plot next to the headstone they restore.
Due to overwhelming demand, officials plan to run the sale as a lottery. The drawing will be held in Janauary.
Offering eternal rest next to the stars is a compromise, Paris city officials say, that both respects the dead and lets residents be buried within the city, where there is very little room remaining for graves.
Families are responsible for maintaining gravestones and monuments in Paris, but some graves have become abandoned over time, causing the gravestone to crumble.
To be clear, none of the gravestones that are up for sale belong to any of the cemetery's most famous residents, so you might not be elbow to elbow with Jim Morrison, but you could be adjacent.
And, at the moment, applications for these purchases are only open to people who live in Paris — and they'll have just six months to restore the gravestone and a limited timeframe after that to buy the plot.
Burial plots are sold either in perpetuity (€17,668/$20,294) or can be leased for 10, 30 or 50 years, at prices ranging from $1,120 to more than $6,000.