eBay offers eternity with Marilyn Monroe

The body of Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe has been secured in a marble crypt in the Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery since she died in 1962.

Since then she has seen many celebrities move into crypts around her creating a wall of the who’s who of deceased celebrities including Dean Martin, Rodney Dangerfield, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Carl Wilson, and more recently Farah Fawcett. But the crypt directly above Monroe’s resting spot has recently become vacant on eBay, meaning the spot is now up for grabs. Reuters reports the widow of the man buried above Monroe has been forced to put the crypt up for sale on eBay in order to raise money to pay off the mortgage on her Beverly Hills home. She now plans to move her husband to an adjacent crypt which was originally meant for her. Richard Poncher, an American Folk figure who died 23 years ago at the age of 81 has been in the plot above Monroe since 1986. According to the eBay advertisement, “while having drinks at the bar of the famed Romanoff's Restaurant in Beverly Hills, [Poncher] struck up a conversation with Joe DiMaggio which led to the eventual sale of the crypt above Marilyn Monroe.” The original bid, as stated on Reuters, was submitted to eBay in August and was reported as being worth $4.6 billion. The offer was later pulled out by the unidentified bidder. The next round in the auction had the plot pegged at $500,000 which failed to get any bids and has remained bid-free since then. For the time being, the Poncher family is now “weighing their options” according to Eric Gazin who is the organizer of the Monroe plot auction and works for auctioncause.com. According to the auctioning website, Gazin is an "expert on everything eBay related for more than 11 years." A long-standing rumor is circulating as to whether or not Poncher was actually buried face down in his crypt. According to the website FindaGrave.com Poncher’s “close friends waited for everyone else to leave, then turned the body upside down before the crypt was sealed--leaving Poncher face down "on top of" Marilyn for eternity.” One of the more recent sales of a crypt near Monroe fetched $75,000 and was sold to Hugh Hefner, the Publisher of Playboy Magazine according to the Associated Press. The eBay advertisement can be found by clicking here.