The most incredible cases of inheritance

There are several types of rich people: some have worked tirelessly all their lives, others have just one idea in a million that helped them soar to the top, others were born into rich families and did not work a single day in their lives, the fourth just bought a lottery ticket for a couple of bucks and now they don’t know where to spend the millions that have fallen on their heads.

Today we will talk about legacies and those impressive fortunes that came as a real surprise to many. Most often, an inheritance is left to reimburse relatives for expenses for funerals, rituals, etc., but sometimes the amount is a little bigger. Several million dollars bigger.

• 1. A waitress inherited $500,000 from a customer

  A seventeen-year-old waitress Sarah Woods in her town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in 1992 became friends with Bill Craxton, who often went to the cafe where she worked as a waitress. He was a widower, and she lost her father at the age of 10, and this brought them closer. Woods often helped the old man around the house, did minor cleaning and so on.

  Craxton, in turn, said that he imagined his children exactly like Sarah. He died at the age of 82 from a heart attack. Already in the hospital, just before his death, he indicated the phone number of Woods as a close relative and called her his heiress. So she suddenly got $500,000, a house, and two cars. Woods spent the money on the right thing, on her studies.

• 2. 17 randomly selected Portuguese inherited the fortune of an aristocrat

  The Portuguese aristocrat Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara was a wealthy childless bachelor. He died of natural causes at the age of 42. And on the day of his death, seventeen unsuspecting Portuguese people received a phone call and were told that they had become the heirs of one of the richest people in Portugal. Luis randomly selected all these people in the phone book 13 years before he died. In addition to 25,000 euros, he bequeathed a 12-room apartment, a house and a car. All this was divided among seventeen strangers.

• 3. Homeless brothers inherited $6.6 million from a grandmother they never knew

  Solt and Geza Peladi lived in a cave a few kilometers from Budapest and scoured the city in search of more or less valuable rubbish, in order to sell it later for pennies. Their grandmother lost them long ago and could not find them for a long time. After her death, lawyers contacted social services to find the two lost brothers and report that they were now six and a half million richer. It is a miracle that the lawyers managed to find them, because their own mother abandoned them when they were barely one year old.

• 4. Mort Zachter inherited $6 million from uncles he thought were poor

  A New York accountant spent his childhood watching his parents work 100-hour weeks at a bakery owned by his uncles, Henry and Joe. They were paid with leftover bread and biscuits, and his whole life was a struggle until he was 36.

  It was at this age that he learned that the uncles were much more successful than he could have imagined, because it was he who inherited $6 million from them. His parents refused this money when their son offered them to take the inheritance they rightfully deserved. Now Mort continues to write his memoirs and is in no hurry to spend a lot of money.

• 5. Tony Chan inherited $4.2 billion by cheating on a weird woman

  Once the richest woman in Asia, Nina Wang, upon learning that she had cancer, rewrote her will, thus making Tony Chan, a Feng Shui master, happy. He promised that the special practice would help her live forever, if, of course, she remembered to mention him in her will.

  Before that, all the money was intended for her family and a small part had to go to charity. When the will was read out, the relatives immediately filed a lawsuit; the court decided the case in favor of the original content. Chan was arrested for fraud and forgery.

• 6. Eva Paolo inherited $40 million from her lost father

  It took a simple Argentine maid nine years of heavy lawsuits and even the exhumation of the body for DNA comparison to confirm her relationship with Baron Rufino Otero. Eva always guessed that her father was of noble blood, but her mother took this secret to the grave.

• 7. A teenager inherited an island with treasures hidden on it from his grandfather

  Josh saw his grandfather only a few times, but this did not stop him from becoming the sole heir to his grandfather's unthinkable fortune. Samuel (Josh's grandfather) never approved of his daughter's marriage for religious reasons, but he doted on his grandson.

  He left 80 acres of farmland and another 36 acres as a private island. The will also spoke of precious stones hidden somewhere on the island "in a jar." Josh's mother and Samuel’s daughter says she used to play "treasure island" with her father all the time as a child.

• 8. A homeless man ran away from the police who wanted to tell him the good news about the inheritance of $6 million

  Thomas Martinez, 67, lived on the street in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia. One day, the cops approached him while he was sleeping on a bench to tell him that his late wife, whom he had divorced a few years earlier, had left him $6 million.

  Martinez decided that they wanted to arrest him for drug possession, vagrancy or alcoholism, and ran away. Local newspapers trumpeted him, tried to find him, and joked a little about the freshly baked millionaire: “The local millionaire ran away from his inheritance ...” Surprisingly, the whereabouts of the millionaire are still unknown.

• 9. Charles Vince Millar left his fortune to the "woman with the most children"

  Charles Vince Millar was a successful Canadian lawyer and businessman who liked to play tricks on greedy people. At the time of his death, he had neither relatives nor children, so the text of the will was full of unusual requests.

  The strangest and most unusual request ordered the lawyer to transfer part of the capital into cash 10 years after his death and give all the money to the mother of the biggest number of children. This period was called the "stork race", and in the end, litigation flared up. After a thorough check, 4 women divided this money among themselves, and each received $ 750,000. They had 9 children.