Where is Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise?

Part of this grave went missing once. Not the body. Something else — and it stayed gone for thirty-seven years. Start at the beginning, though. Jim Morrison died in a rented Paris apartment in July of 1971, in the bathtub, twenty-seven years old. His girlfriend found him. The official cause was heart failure. Nobody ordered an autopsy, so the rumors filled the gap instead — heroin, maybe, or a chronic asthma attack, or a death that happened somewhere else entirely and got quietly relocated. Nobody's ever settled it. He was buried here within days, fast and small, before most people even knew he'd died. His own family found out from the news. For years the grave stayed almost unmarked. Then, in 1981, on the tenth anniversary of his death, a Croatian sculptor added a white marble bust. And that's when things got out of hand. Fans by the thousands, scrawling names across the stone, across every grave nearby. By 1988, someone had had enough — or wanted a very strange souvenir. On the ninth of May, the bust vanished. Two young men later called a magazine claiming responsibility, gave an interview, showed off the photos. They never really explained why they'd done it. The grave went through a full renovation in 1990. Morrison's parents replaced the ruined headstone with a plain new one, carved with a line in Greek: ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ. True to his own spirit. The following year, on the twentieth anniversary, things got worse before they got better — a riot broke out at the grave, police had to clear it with tear gas. After that, Père Lachaise posted a permanent guard there and put the whole area under camera surveillance. It's still the most visited grave of a musician anywhere in the world. And the bust. Nobody saw it again for thirty-seven years. Then, in May of 2025, police stumbled onto it by accident, during a completely unrelated fraud investigation somewhere across Paris. Still covered in graffiti. Nose still broken, same as the day it disappeared. It's sitting in police storage now. Nobody's decided yet whether it's coming back here. Which means, all these decades on, a man famous for singing about no one getting out alive still has a piece of himself unaccounted for.