10 strange last wishes mentioned in wills

WILLS are meant to protect the interests of the people you leave behind when you die. But their most important function is that that there is no delay in settling your estate after your death. Take a look at this list of 10 strange last wishes made by famous people.

William Shakespeare
Died: 1616

Last Wish: That his wife receive his “second best bed”.
Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway and the request baffled people at the time. Apparently leaving a bed to someone at the time was not unusual because good quality beds free of fleas or vermin was highly prized.

George Bernard Shaw
Died: 1950

Last Wish: No religious service and that his tombstone not “take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.”
Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. He was also hard on religion and his will included a section that gave his support to “Darwin’s millennial saga of creation” over the Bibles “six day synopsis”. He left a sizeable portion of his estate to promote the new alphabet. This wish was not granted after a court overruled it as it was “impossible”. The money was distributed to The British Museum, The National Gallery of Ireland, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Charles Dickens
Died: 1870

Last Wish: That mourners who attend his funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hatband, or other “such revolting absurdity”.
Dickens also stated that he did not want a public funeral and the place and time of his funeral were not to be made public. He requested a simple funeral. The requests of Dickens, who was regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, were ignored and he was was buried in grand style.

Virgil
Died: 10 BC

Last wish: That his poetry be destroyed in a fire
According to Encyclopedia Britannica Virgil was regarded by the Romans as their greatest poet. He is best known for his Aeneid – once the national poem of Rome. Before dying, he completed only 12 books and because it was incomplete, he left instructions that it be destroyed by fire after his death. His friends, mortified when they found out, managed to remove the request from his will. Today, he is known as one of the greatest ancient poets who ever lived.

Benjamin Franklin
Died: 1790

Last Wish: That his daughter not engage in “the expensive, vain and useless pastime of wearing jewels.”
Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He apparently owned a portrait of King Louis XV! In a frame studded with 408 diamonds. This was left to his daughter and he apparently did not want her to remove the diamonds to wear them as jewellery.

William Hearst
Died: 1951

Last Wish: That anyone who could prove “that he or she is a child of mine [receive] the sum of one dollar. I hereby declare that any such asserted claim […] would be utterly false.”
According to Wikipedia Hearst was an American newspaper publisher who built the nation’s largest newspaper chain and whose methods profoundly influenced American journalism

Harry Houdini
Died: 1926

Last Wish: That his wife hold an annual seance so he could reveal himself to her.
Houdini left his wife a secret note with 10 randomly selected words that he would communicate to her after his death. For 10 years his wife held a seance on Halloween; Houdini never showed.

John B Kelly
Died: 1960

Last Wish: That the clothing bills of his daughter, Princess Grace, not bankrupt the principality of Monaco.
He was the father of Grace Kelly, actress and Princess of Monaco (thus maternal grandfather of Albert II, Prince of Monaco). He was also an Olympic winning oarsman.

John Bowman
Died: 1891

Last Wish: That dinner to be prepared every night after his death in case he came back to life.
He set up a trust worth $50,000 to pay people to keep up the housework in his 21 room mansion and requested that a daily meal be prepared in case the his family returned hungry from the dead. The will was honored until the trust ran out of funds in 1950.

Napoleon Bonaparte
Died: 1821

Last Wish: That his head be shaved and the hair divided up amongst his friends.
In later discovered that the hair that his friends kept contained large amounts of arsenic.

Pictures and information: Courtesy of Listverse