A widow left her inherited fortune to a Lincoln charity home; her family said a planchette and her dead husband's spirit guided her, and Nebraska upheld the will in 1895

Kind 1. Elizabeth C. Handley of Brownville inherited her husband's estate, valued at $36,000 to $37,000, when he died about ten years before her will. She was a delegate to the 1888 Prohibition Party convention and vice-president of the Society of the Home for the Friendless in Lincoln. On 26 January 1892, aged about 60, she signed a will drawn by Judge John S. Stull. It gave her books, watch and jewelry to her nephew John C. Ward and everything else to the Home for the Friendless. The will said she was "under no particular obligations" to her relations. Her brothers and sisters contested it. A witness, Mrs Smith, testified that Handley believed she spoke with her dead husband through a planchette, and that she had said the planchette advised her to go and see Judge Stull. The heirs argued the will came from an insane delusion. A jury upheld the will. On 5 March 1895 the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed. Belief in spiritualism, it held, does not prove incapacity unless a delusion controlled the gift, and no evidence showed the spirits turned her against her family. The court wrote that "spirit-wills are too celestial for cognizance by earthly tribunals". It refused to pay the contestants' lawyers out of the estate. Whether the Home could legally take the bequest was left for a separate case.