S. Sanborn
Sanborn, an American hatmaker, bequeathed his body to science when he died in 1871. One Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a professor of anatomy at Harvard Medical School, and one of Holmes’s colleagues received the body. Was it for research?
No, not really. Instead, Sanborn wanted to be drums. He stipulated that two drums were to be made out of Sanborn’s skin and given to a friend, on the condition that every June 17th at dawn, the friend would play “Yankee Doodle” at Bunker Hill to commemorate the anniversary of the famous Revolutionary War battle. A true patriot, even after death. The rest of his body was to be made into fertilizer to contribute to the growth of an American elm.
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.
Jonathan Jackson
A 19th-century Columbus, Ohio, man named Jonathan Jackson was a true animal lover. His will stipulated that “It is man's duty as lord of animals to watch over and protect the lesser and feebler.” When he died in 1880, he left money in order to create a cat house.
No, not that kind of cat house. It was really, truly, a place where cats could enjoy all the creature comforts of life, such as large bedrooms, dining halls, an auditorium to listen to live accordion music, an exercise room, and a special roof designed for climbing that wouldn't risk any of his feline friends while they were seeing the great outdoors.
Marie Curie
Marie Curie was born in Russian-occupied Poland in 1867, but moved to Paris at the age of twenty-four to study science. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, and won a Nobel prize in two different fields – physics and chemistry, the first person to do so.
When she died, the only thing in her estate worth much was a gram of pure radium, which she then gifted to the University of Paris, on the condition that her daughter Irene Curie be allowed to use the gram for any of her scientific research. Element 96, Curium, was named in honor of Marie and her husband, Pierre.