He did not ask to be buried as Dracula

A small correction with a large afterlife, and the reason this entry exists: **the most famous single image in horror fandom is a document about the gap between an audience's picture of somebody and the person.** Bela Lugosi died on 16 August 1956 and "was buried wearing a Dracula cape, his full costume, and his Dracula ring in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California." All of that is true and it is why the grave is a pilgrimage site. Then: **"Contrary to popular belief, Lugosi never requested to be buried in his cloak; Bela G. Lugosi confirmed on numerous occasions that he and his mother, Lillian, made the decision."** So the romantic version - the actor asking to be buried as the vampire - is wrong, and the true version is better: his son and his mother chose it, which is a family making a decision about a character rather than a performer choosing his own ending. That is the difference between this site and a fandom wiki, and it is worth an entry on its own because the myth was the *better* story. One more thing the record corrects while it is here: "The rumor that Lugosi was clutching the script for The Final Curtain, a planned Ed Wood project, at the time of his death **was a myth**" - another of the famous last-images that nobody checked. And a coincidence worth not muddling: Mickey's name was suggested by Disney's wife Lillian, and this decision was taken by Lugosi's son Bela G. and **his** mother Lillian. Two different Lillians, twenty-eight years and one of them deciding what a dead man would be wearing.