As a Californian prune rancher, Thomas Shewbridge wasn’t all that well known during his life, and that’s okay. His will, of all things, brought him into the public eye when he left twenty-nine thousand stock shares in the local electric company to his two dogs, Mac and George.
For the most part, this didn’t really mean that much, but since they were major shareholders, it did mean that the dogs had to be present for the board of directors’ meetings. The two dogs also inherited an estate worth almost $250,000. The dogs weren’t very interested in the meetings, but that’s not because they’re dogs. It’s just because shareholder meetings are boring.
Patricia O'Neill
Patricia O'Neill had plenty of dosh to spread around, being the daughter of the Countess of Kenmore. Did she leave it to her family? Her friends? Did she have her ashes mixed into a portrait of herself, or stipulate that her family had to enter her perfectly-preserved body into a triathlon? None of these, unfortunately.
Instead, she simply left the entirety of her forty million pound fortune, the equivalent of more than fifty-three million dollars, to her pet Chimp Kalu. Unfortunately for Kalu, O'Neill's financial state tanked thanks to bad investments and management, meaning there isn't much left for him once she passes – O'Neill has to exist on gifts from friends.
Charles Vance Miller
We kind of wish we knew more about Charles Vance Miller. He seems like a hoot. This Canadian attorney's will stipulated that in the decade following his death (which occurred in 1926), whichever Toronto woman produced the most offspring would acquire a large sum of money from his estate.
Four different women – each with nine children during that time span whoa – won the contest, receiving about $125,000 each. Nowadays that many kids for that amount wouldn't be worth it, but in 1936, that was equivalent to one million, eight-hundred thousand in USD today. That's enough to cover everything, including college.
T.M. Zink
Lawyer T.M. Zink might have the strangest request on this entire list. When he died, he left a trust fund of fifty thousand dollars to create a library, but not just any library. He wanted a library totally devoid of women. No books, or art, made by women (easy), no decorations by women (might be tough), and no female employees (impossible).
Zink's own daughter contested the will and was actually successful. The womanless library was never founded, no matter what Zink's reasoning was. Was he a misogynist? Or did he just want a library that actually had books worth reading? We may never know.
James Kidd
James Kidd, Arizona hermit, and miner, disappeared in 1949 and was declared legally dead in 1956. His handwritten will was found in 1963, and it stipulated that his entire estate, worth around $275,000 at the time, should “go in a research for some scientific proof of a soul of a human body which leaves at death.”
Courts received more than a hundred petitions for the inheritance but dismissed all of them. In 1971, the money was awarded to the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City, though it has as of yet failed to scientifically prove the existence of the soul.