I recently had a villager achieve Esteemed Elder status (my 4th). I saw his totem appear, then disappear when I went to move it. No one celebrated for him. Around the same time, his grave appeared without an esteemed elder inscription. HOWEVER, 3 game years later he is still cruising around the village, happy and healthy! Any ideas??

Lets just say that the Elders name is Nato. Nato is a healthy, young villager with no reason to die. At the same time, there is a villager living in your tribe who also has the name Nato. He is not an esteemd elder, and is quite sick and weak.
One day, the weak Nato died. His name went on the gravestone, and because he was only a trainee farmer, there was no Esteemed Elder inscription on the grave. The healthy, master at 3 skills Nato is still alive and happy for three more game years.

This all makes sense. The only part I dont understand is the disappearing totem...it's probably a small glitch.

Also, villagers don't celebrate when someone becomes an EE.

It happened in the Aika's Tribe!! I wrote this:

"Dead but still alive
Yesterday, one of my villagers, Marius, became Esteemed Elder! But I didn't find his totem and I thought that I'll find it after I quit the game.
Today, I return to watch my tribe and find a new tomb. It's written "Marius" – "Dedicated Student" – "Master Scientist" – "48 years old"
But when I check my villagers, what I see?!! Marius!! Always Esteemed Elder, healthy at 100% and 51 years old! And always no totem!!
Of course, I'm very happy to see him! I love this one very much (for the Aika's memoirs readers, he his the Hilda's son! )
I have an event that takes away all the food so everybody is fishing and Marius too, as the brave fellow he is!!
What do you think of that?"

It happened just once in all my VVs experience!
I think it's a little rare "bug"!!

It certainly sounds like a bug. I don't remember anyone reporting this in the forums, though, so it seems rare, although laurence says that she's mentioned it before.

Perhaps Barbara will know.

Perhaps not. The programming for the elders and totems is complex, and it's not surprising that there might be a few undiscovered bugs out there. We know that there are problems with totems for elders who have gained the third skill from the gong. But I can't say what happened in this case.

By the way, only the first totem is celebrated by the villagers, since it is the one that completes the puzzle. All totems after that are not celebrated.

Thanks for the info. I was worrying I had killed the totem by trying to pick it up too soon or some such nonsense. ( It was a pretty one!) My beloved Yap now has two headstones - One at 69 and another at 77, on which he is remembered as an Esteemed Elder.

Hmmm... a couple of times I have found what appeared to be two headstones for a villager, one an Elder and one not. In the past I thought I had perhaps two villagers with the same name, as often happens, and I'd forgotten somehow about one of them. Perhaps those were in fact instances of the bug. What do the stats say about the number of Elders? Do they agree with the number of totems you have?

No, I have one more elder in my count than I have totems. I am sure I only had one villager with that name. My tribe was smallish at that time.