20 Historical Wills With Truly Bizarre Final Wishes

The British philosopher Jeremy Bentham died in London on June 6, 1832. A codicil to his will, a legal document used to add to or modify an existing will, ordered his body to be publicly dissected and then preserved as an “Auto-Icon,” stuffed with hay, dressed in his own clothes and hat, and seated with his walking stick. He was essentially leaving himself behind, too. He was delivered to University College London in 1850. Bentham’s head was never successfully preserved, and a wax head sits atop the Auto-Icon today; his actual mummified head is kept elsewhere.

Playwright William Shakespeare wrote out his will in March 1616; he died shortly after, on April 23 that year. The bulk of his estate was left to his older daughter, Susanna Hall. Shakespeare’s will left his widow, Anne Hathaway, only “my second best bed with the furniture,” but in a Jacobean household, the best bed was reserved for guests and the second best would have been the marital bed. And English law provided widows with dower rights, meaning that they were guaranteed housing and income.

While Napoleon Bonaparte was in exile on the island of St. Helena, he dictated a will with codicils in April 1821. Napoleon died on May 5, 1821. Napoleon had his hair cut and braided into bracelets for his mother, siblings, and son. He also requested that his heart be preserved and delivered to his wife, Empress Marie Louise. The heart was refused passage by the British Governor Hudson Lowe. The hair bracelets, at least, made it to their intended recipients.

In 1949, an Arizona copper prospector named James Kidd disappeared in the Superstition Mountains. He had made out a handwritten will on January 2, 1946, which was discovered in his safe-deposit box. Lacking family, Kidd left his money, around $200,000, to “research or some scientific proof of a soul” so that perhaps “a Photograph of soul leaving the human at death” might be possible. His bequest resulted in a court battle nicknamed the “Soul Trial” in 1967, which awarded the money to the American Society for Psychical Research.

In 1926, a Canadian lawyer named Charles Vance Millar died without ever having married. He left a clause in his will promising the remainder of his estate to any Toronto woman who produced the highest number of registered children in the decade after his death. Canada’s Supreme Court affirmed his will, against objections from relatives, in 1937, and in 1938 more than $500,000 was divided among four mothers who were tied for first place. Yes, his inheritance had effectively become a decade-long baby competition. A related clause of the will, which gave his Jamaican house to rival clergymen, failed because he no longer owned the house at the time.

Wellington R. Burt, a Michigan lumber baron bitter over long-running family disputes, died in March 1919. His children received only annual allowances from their father’s estate, while the bulk of his fortune remained tied up in a trust for 21 years after his last grandchild, Marion Lansill, died in November 1989. When the trust finally matured in May 2011, 92 years after Burt’s death, the 12 distant descendants split roughly $110 million.

In 1871, in his probated will, Solomon Sanborn, a Medford, Massachusetts, hatmaker, bequeathed his corpse to the Harvard physician Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. There was one proviso: that his tanned skin be fashioned into two drumheads, one bearing the Declaration of Independence, and the other, poet Alexander Pope’s “Universal Prayer.” He requested that a friend beat these drums on Bunker Hill annually on June 17, the anniversary of the battle. Because simply being buried was evidently too ordinary. How long this continued, no one knows.

The Scottish writer J. M. Barrie left all copyrights and royalty payments from Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. He had assigned the rights to the hospital in 1929, and his final will, confirmed upon his death on June 19, 1937, reaffirmed the gift. But as the copyright’s expiration date approached in the late 1980s, the British Parliament passed a special bill in 1988 ensuring that the hospital would continue to receive royalty payments in the United Kingdom indefinitely.

Ella Wendel, the last descendant of a wealthy New York real estate family that had secluded itself for generations, died in her Fifth Avenue mansion on March 13, 1931. At the time, U.S. law barred animals from owning property. Instead, the estate placed strict conditions on the house, protecting her French poodle, Toby: his own bedroom with a brass bed, dedicated servants, and sole use of the yard until his death around 1931-32. Legally, he owned nothing. In practice, Toby was doing pretty well for himself.

The estate of Iowa lawyer T. M. Zink, who died on September 11, 1930, gave almost everything, some $50,000, to a 75-year trust to produce $4 million and build a “Zink Womanless Library.” He left nothing to his wife and just $5 to his daughter, Margretta Becker. Becker sued, and an Iowa court declared the trust invalid in 1931. The library was never built.

John Porter Bowman, owner of a tannery that provided leather for the Union Army, lost his wife and two daughters. He built a mausoleum and mansion in Cuttingsville, Vermont. When he died on September 21, 1891, his will set up a $50,000 trust requiring servants to cook a hot dinner every evening, in case his family came back from the dead. No one was going to return from the afterlife to an empty dinner table on his watch. This went on for nearly sixty years until the money ran out in 1950.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw, who died November 2, 1950, leaving an estate valued at more than £500,000, advocated in his will for a new 40-letter alphabet (the Shavian alphabet) to replace what he thought to be the wasteful standard English alphabet. The family and institutions who would inherit most of his estate contested the plan. In 1957, the judge Sir Charles Harman decided the trust was invalid because it lacked public benefit, but he sanctioned a compromise: only £8,300 would be allocated to a design contest for a new version of the Shavian alphabet.

Major Peter Labelliere, a retired British Marine officer living in Dorking, Surrey, thought that the world was upside down. Before he passed away on June 4, 1800, he left instructions to be buried head-first at the summit of Box Hill, Surrey, figuring that because the world was inverted, he would end up right-side up on Resurrection Day. You can’t say he hadn’t thought the logistics through. On June 11, 1800, thousands of people turned out to witness his vertical burial. A stone memorial can still be seen on Box Hill.

The wealthy English property developer Henry Budd died in 1862, leaving a fortune worth £200,000. Budd detested the mustache, considering it an affectation common among the military and a sign of folly. In his will, he divided his estate equally between his two sons, William and Edward, stipulating that whoever grew a mustache would forfeit his half to his clean-shaven brother. That’s an expensive amount of facial hair. To keep his half of the fortune, neither brother grew a mustache for the rest of his life.

British architect Sir John Soane died on January 20, 1837, leaving a highly detailed will. After his son George published anonymous attacks on his work, Soane had Parliament pass a special Act in 1833, turning his London townhouses and art collection into a public museum forever, permanently cutting George out of the estate.

German poet Heinrich Heine spent the final eight years of his life bedridden in Paris, where he had a turbulent marriage to his wife, Crescence Eugénie Mirat (“Mathilde”). But when he died on February 17, 1856, Heine willed his estate and royalties to Mathilde under one stipulation: She must remarry. Heine joked that this would ensure “there will be at least one man to regret my death.” He managed to work one final jab into the paperwork. Mathilde never remarried and lived off the income from Heine’s estate for the rest of her life.

In a June 1789 codicil, American statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin gave £1,000, about $4,400, each to Boston and Philadelphia to support “low-interest loans to young married tradesmen.” He prohibited the money from being withdrawn in full until 100 years had passed, and from full distribution until 200 years after his death in 1790, to demonstrate the power of compound interest. By 1990, the combined trusts had expanded to more than $6.5 million, which funded trade schools and scholarships.

In March of 1804, Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelford, a notoriously violent British peer, prepared a will before engaging in a duel with Captain Thomas Best. In his will, Camelford requested that Best not be prosecuted for the duel, and that he be buried in Switzerland beneath three lime trees without a tombstone. That became considerably harder to arrange when Pitt (aka Camelford) was killed on March 10, 1804, and the Napoleonic Wars made transport across the continent impossible. His corpse ended up in a London vault and disappeared.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume had a lifelong disagreement with his playwright friend John Home over the spelling of their surnames. Hume drank claret, and Home drank port. Nineteen days before his death on August 25, 1776, Hume added a codicil giving Home six dozen bottles of port and a single bottle of claret on the condition that Home drink the claret in one sitting and then sign a statement spelling his name “Hume,” which would also earn him a £200 payment from Hume’s estate. Even dying wasn’t enough to make Hume let the spelling argument go! I get that, though.

The Roman poet Virgil got sick in Megara in 19 BCE, returning from Greece, and came to believe that his magnum opus, the Aeneid, would not be finished before he died. He charged his literary executors, the people responsible for handling his writings after his death, Lucius Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to burn it if he died. The wish was also included in his will. However, after his death on September 21, 19 BCE, the emperor Augustus overturned Virgil’s wishes and commanded the executors to publish the poem with a few revisions.

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