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The Doors frontman Jim Morrison was the ultimate rock star, even if you don’t take his music into account.

I’m sorry if this upsets you, but The Doors were never that good a band. They had a fistful of decent pop singles, maybe a good album if you really, really squint at The Doors. However, what they were was a fantastic delivery method for Morrison’s absolutely incredible star power. The man looked amazing, could make the most bizarre things he ever plucked out of his brain sound deep and was a natural performer.

Thanks to that, it became accepted that he was a great musician, and The Doors were also a world-class band. That’s some weapons-grade conmanship right there, in my view. The air of mystery that Morrison put over everything elevated The Doors to an incredible extent. They were no longer the drunken buffoons but louche, poetic libertines like Morrison’s hero Arthur Rimbaud. Above all, he had a star power so intense that it even made people doubt his very death.

By 1970, the tolls that Morrison’s lifestyle were taking on him were becoming unignorable. The booze had been a problem for years now, but more importantly, The Doors were now a commercial juggernaut. They were one of the biggest bands in the world, and Morrison had mentioned to many people that he was deeply uncomfortable with his level of celebrity. Then, when Morrison finally met his maker in a Parisian hotel bathtub, several people straight up refused to believe it.

After all, what better way of getting the public off your back than by faking your own death and disappearing into the wilderness, living wild and free without a record company or fan expectations breathing down your neck? Morrison never had an autopsy anyway, wake up sheeple! He’s alive and living in Syracuse, New York! An actual conspiracy theory that real-life human adult Jeff Finn went to the trouble of making an entire documentary about.

It turns out that the French medical system of the time only did autopsies if there was anything suspicious about the death. At the time, the people attending to Morrison took one look at him and thought, ‘Yep. Dead guy there, heart failure exacerbated by heavy drinking.’ Turns out they were right.

Or were they? Because as it turns out, there really is something suspicious about the death of Jim Morrison, with many credible sources saying so.

The question isn’t whether he’s dead, but how. The story has passed into history but if you ask several people who knew him well, including Marianne Faithfull, Morrison died of a heroin overdose. Sam Bennett, the founder of the Paris nightclub Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, claims that he found The Doors frontman unconscious in the club’s bathroom. Before he could call an ambulance, two burly types had picked ‘The Lizard King’ up and were promising to return him to his apartment.

There’s actual smoke here, especially when Ben Fong-Torres, the notorious Rolling Stone editor of the time, claimed that anyone who called Morrison’s hotel were told that he was alive, and just in hospital resting up.

Additionally, the film director Agnès Varda, a woman so close to Morrison that she was one of only four people who turned up to his funeral, shockingly told the Studiocanal documentary Jim Morrison: An American poet in Paris that not only was there a cover-up, but she was the one allegedly put in charge of it.

So, how did Jim Morrison die? Maybe we’ll never know for sure. Maybe the answer’s staring us in the face. Either way, the shadow of his mystique obscures everything, making it a beguiling mystery over half a century later.