If your clients have some strange requests when it comes to their last wishes spare a thought for the Will writers instructions by these testators:
S. Sanborn – Sanborn, a 19th-century New England hatter, left a rather macabre bequest to a friend — a pair of drums made from Sanborn’s skin. The friend received further instructions to go to Bunker Hill each June 17th and play “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on the drums.
T.M. Zink – Zink, an Iowa lawyer who died in 1930, must have had some pretty bad experiences with women. When he died he left his daughter a measly five bucks, and his wife got nothing. He stipulated that the rest of his $100,000 estate be put in a trust for 75 years, then used to
create the Zink Womanless Library. The library would have no feminine decorations, no books or magazine articles by female authors, and was required to have “No Women Admitted” carved into the stone over the entrance.
Robert Louis Stevenson – When the celebrated author died, he left his friend Annie H. Ide his birthday. Ide had previously complained to Stevenson about the inconvenience of being born on Christmas, so the writer left her November 13th as a new birthday provided she take care of it with “moderation and humanity… the said birthday not being so young as it once was.”
