Cobain Fans Making Pilgrimage To Park

The home of the late Kurt Cobain has become a destination for tourists, the curious and young fans on a modern pilgrimage.

Six teenagers from Spencer, W.V., were picked up by Seattle police last month, after they drove across country in a stolen van to visit Cobain's home city and the site where he committed suicide last April.

The pilgrimage was no surprise to police spokesman Sean O'Donnell.

"There was a pretty big migration after his suicide," he said.

O'Donnell recalls police picking up a group of runaways from Salt Lake City, and he said police occasionally are called to deal with fans hanging out around the million-dollar residence in the Denny Blaine neighborhood overlooking Lake Washington.

The house still is home to Courtney Love and the couple's young daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.

Though the house is largely hidden by hedges and the driveway is blocked by a chained gate, fans stop at Viretta Park next door almost every day to take pictures of the garage where Cobain shot himself, or to carve messages to Love and Cobain in the park benches.

"There are always people here. There's a steady stream of out-of-town people," said Spencer Morbeck, 18, who lives three doors away. "I think they haven't gotten over it yet. Sometimes you just want to send them away."

But Morbeck admits he finds the attention from friends and strangers "kind of cool."

One recent visitor was 14-year-old Mike Skuba of Edmonton, Alberta, who was on a family holiday in Seattle and persuaded his father to look for the house.

"We did the harbor tour, and shopping along the pier," said Mike's dad, Irvine Skuba. "What else?"

"We bought Nirvana CDs. We found a store with bootleg CDs," added Mike, who said he's become an even more avid Nirvana fan since Cobain's suicide, collecting every recording and article he can find.

"The mystique grew after he died," said the senior Skuba. "I compare it to when Elvis died and record stores were swamped with people who wanted Elvis records. Even though you knew they were going to keep pressing records, you wanted to have a piece of it."

One reason attention focuses on Love's home is because there is no gravesite to visit.

Love purchased a plot in Calvary Catholic Cemetery north of the University of Washington, but plans for a grave stalled when the cemetery required Love to pay for the cost of security and maintenance.

"We certainly didn't want to have any vandalism to their personal property and we wanted to be sure the religious nature of the cemetery was upheld," said Richard Peterson, director of cemeteries for the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle.

"There hasn't been any final determination. I don't know what the family plans to do," he said.

Another Seattle rock legend, Jimi Hendrix, died 25 years ago, but his grave in Renton's Greenwood Memorial Park still gets an average of 15 visitors a day, according to cemetery staffer Twyla Hardy.

Employees at the Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau say they get calls all the time asking the whereabouts of Hendrix's grave - and Cobain's.

"If there was a grave for him people would go there," said neighbor Morbeck. "But they'd also come here. They want to get the full experience."

But in spite of their popularity, Cobain landmarks are not just tourist spots.

Two Seattle teenagers sitting in Viretta Park on a recent evening said it's a place where they like to come hang out.

"It's kind of a spirit thing," one of the teens said.