Decades ago, baseball legend Joe DiMaggio sold his crypt to a man named Richard Poncher. Poncher then made it one of his dying wishes to be buried face down, so he may gaze eternally at the plot below him, which belongs to Marilyn Monroe. Poncher passed away in 1986.
In 2009, his wife, Elsie Poncher, needed to pay off the mortgage, so she put her dead husband’s plot up for sale on eBay for $500,000. The bidding wars were ferocious, leaping into the seven figures, until they finally rested at $4.6 million. But the winning bidder never paid up. Nor did the next bidder, or anyone at all; no one even tried to purchase the plot for the starting bid. The whole thing fell through.
“They were all phony balonies,” Elsie told the Los Angeles Times.
Poncher is still buried above Monroe. Hugh Hefner moved in next door after he passed away in 2017; he had purchased the plot adjacent to Monroe in Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park for $75,000 in 1992.
