Deciding where your money should go once you’re no longer here can be a difficult decision, particularly if you don’t have any children as natural heirs. Portuguese aristocrat Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara had a unique means of choosing who would inherit his fortune – he plucked 70 total strangers out of the Lisbon phone directory. In front of two witnesses at a local registry office, Carlos selected the unknowing beneficiaries 13 years before his death in 2007.
The 70 strangers were notified after Carlos’ death that they were the lucky joint recipients of €25,000 ($33.1k/£16.8k), a 12-room apartment in central Lisbon, a property near the historic northern town of Guimaraes and a car. Wills are not commonplace in Portugal and typically a person’s wealth will go to the state if there are no living family members to inherit the assets. Unsurprisingly, many of the beneficiaries believed they were being scammed when they were first told about the inheritance.
In 1930, American newspaper the Pittsburgh Post Gazette featured the story of a young woman from Vienna, Austria who had received a surprise phone call from an attorney. Corin Ward was a struggling actress whose fortunes suddenly changed when she was bequeathed every last penny that had belonged to a “Dr. Meszaros”.
The bizarre story of Archibald McArthur remains a local legend in Dodgeville, Wisconsin almost a century after he passed away. McArthur arrived in the city a penniless graduate in the mid-1800s but quickly amassed wealth when he started work as a lawyer. He was known for his eccentricities, which included being suspended from college for hosting illegal seances and refusing a $100,000 inheritance left to him by his brother, which would be equal to around $1.3 million (£934m) today. A renowned recluse, McArthur earned himself the nickname the ‘Dodgeville Hermit’.
Archibald McArthur was worth $250,000 when he died in 1926, which is equivalent to $3.7 million (£2.7m) in today’s money. Around $15,000 of that sum was bequeathed to a friend to pay for her son’s education, and McArthur decided that the remaining $235,000 would go to a young clerk called George Rafferty, who he had befriended on a park bench in Jacksonville, Florida. Sadly for Rafferty, a nephew of McArthur heard about the will and contested it. The courts ruled in favour of awarding the majority of the fortune to McArthur’s long-lost relative.
In the early 1990s, Ohio-based Bill Cruxton was widowed and had no children to inherit his $500,000 (£284k) fortune. But Cruxton knew he wanted his substantial wealth to make a difference to somebody’s life and so decided to leave the bulk of his half-a-million-dollar estate to Cara Wood, a 17-year-old waitress at his local diner, Dink’s Colonial Restaurant in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, which Cruxton visited daily. The pair had become friends during the 13 months leading up to the octogenarian’s death and, as well as being his favourite server, Wood had helped Cruxton around his house and ran errands for him. So when Bill died in 1992 the money went to Cara.
Several people challenged Cruxton’s will, including his 86-year-old sister, who was his only surviving relative. Another waitress also contested the will after she believed she was in an earlier iteration of the document but was then removed. A year after Cruxton’s death a settlement was reached, leaving Wood with his houses, both of his cars, his jewellery and all of his money, apart from around $35,000 (£24.3k), which was divided between those who contested the will. Wood reportedly rented out Cruxton’s properties and invested in the stock market, using the money made from her investments to fund her college education at Ohio University.
Abbotts was her half-sister’s next of kin, and as Mary Major had never made a will Abbotts inherited £300,000 ($589k). Abbotts had known about her mysterious sibling, who was 19 years her senior, but the pair had never been in contact. With her windfall Abbotts paid off her mortgage, gifted some of it to her children, and fulfilled her long-held dream to travel around the world, visiting Sri Lanka, America, Costa Rica and the Caribbean. After becoming unwell, the money also helped her pay for a wet room after she could no longer get in the bath.
When he died on 31 October 1926 at the age of 73, Charles Vance Millar (pictured) launched a race that would transfix the city of Toronto in Canada for the next decade – the Great Stork Derby. Millar had accumulated an extensive fortune during his lifetime, and without any heirs he set his own rules as to who would inherit the money: it would go to whoever had the most babies in the 10-year span following his death. In 1932 the Ontario government tried to have the will nullified as the ongoing contest received press coverage far and wide, but there was no stopping families desperate for the money during the Great Depression.
Local newspapers ranked the families taking part and reported new babies as they were delivered. In 1936, 32 lawyers turned up to an initial hearing to represent families who thought they deserved a cut of the money, but the final race was whittled down to six families. If all the children were not born to the same set of parents they did not count according to the presiding judge, and neither did stillborn babies. In the end four women – Lucy Timleck, Kathleen Nagle, Annie Smith and Isabel MacLean – each received $125,000, which is equivalent to $2.3 million (£1.7m) today, after giving birth to nine children apiece over the decade. Reports speculate whether this was Millar making a wry statement on the then-taboo topic of birth control, which he was known to support. The story of The Stork Derby is so extraordinary that it was even made into a TV movie starring Megan Follows in 2002.
This procreation race was one of several zingers in Millar’s last will and testament – he also left his share of the Catholic-owned O’Keefe beer company to Protestant ministers in the area, bequeathed his Ontario Jockey Club shares to three people, two of whom he knew were vehemently opposed to betting on horse racing, and left a Jamaican holiday home to three lawyers he knew despised one another. The property even came with a joint tenancy clause that insisted that the men live there together and forbade them from cashing out on the property – if they did, all proceeds would go to the City of Kingston for distribution among the poor.
Long estranged from one side of their family, siblings Julia and Christopher Scribbins from County Durham, England didn’t know they had an uncle called Reginald Aldham, and certainly weren’t aware of his £600,000 ($794k) property and the extent of his life savings. Aldham had not written a will and did not have any siblings or children, and so a genealogy firm was tasked with finding his rightful beneficiaries.
Affluent Argentinian land baron Rufino Otero died in 1983, apparently without any heirs to his enormous fortune. However, rumours started to circulate that the multi-millionaire did in fact have an illegitimate child, and that she could be Eva Paole, who was working as a maid in the area. Paole had always believed that she was the daughter of her late mother Josefa’s partner, but after the rumours reached her Paole started to investigate whether her biological father was actually this very wealthy stranger who had recently passed away…
Authorities intended to carry out DNA tests on Otero’s body, but just six weeks into legal proceedings, his grave was found destroyed and the corpse had been stolen and switched for another. The investigation continued, however, as experts were able to carry out tests on Otero’s mother’s body instead. The case rumbled on for nine years, until it was finally confirmed that Paole was Otero’s biological daughter and rightful heir. She retired from her job when inherited the lion’s share of Otero’s $40 million (£22.7m) estate.
At the time of his death from a drug overdose in 2018, it was believed that Charles Rogers, Lord of Penrose Manor in Cornwall, England, didn't have an heir to inherit his 1,536-acre estate (pictured). But local care worker and delivery driver Jordan Rogers knew this wasn’t the case, as his mother had let him in on a secret when he was just eight years old – the Lord of the Manor was likely his absent father…
A year later the death of another German billionaire transformed lives in a foreign country – this time in Hungary and across the Atlantic. Brothers Zsolt and Geza Peladi had been living in a cave in Budapest when volunteers working with the local homeless community reached out to them after being contacted by lawyers. The Peladis then discovered they would be inheriting an enormous sum of €6.6 billion ($8.3bn/£5.9bn) from a grandmother in Germany, which they would share with their sister in the US.
Simon Edwards from Hertfordshire, England knew that he was adopted as a baby and only recently aged 40 discovered the identity of his birth parents. Using DNA testing, Edwards found out that his father was none other than legendary US boxing commentator Bob Sheridan, aka The Colonel. So Edwards, who is a steward for Hitchin Town Football Club, got in touch with Sheridan. By a very strange coincindence his message came through to Sheridan the same day the commentator attended the funeral of his wife of 26 years, Annie (pictured). The pair didn’t have any children.