Howard was an interesting fella.
Here's some stuff I've heard about him over the years from various sources:

Never wore socks and never carried cash--frequently had to borrow dimes from associates to make pay phone calls

Bought TWA with a single phone call, using a borrowed dime

Left all his fortune to a gas station attendant (not true?)

Washed his hands dozens of times a day--had a pathological fear of germs and disease

Watched "Ice Station Zebra" over and over again--several times a day

Weighed less than 90 pounds when he died, his emaciated body covered with bedsores

Neglected by friends and family the last years of his life-- a recluse, but prob would have appreciated a helping hand, and prob would have lived longer if he had had more help.

Died on an airplane on his way to a Houston hospital, not at his suite as reported

Somewhat "insane" but a genius nonetheless--"The Aviator" movie does a good job of portraying this convoluted and misunderstood man.

Left all his fortune to a gas station attendant (not true?)From the Wikipedia:

Melvin Dummar was a Willard, Utah service station owner who claimed that at 11 p.m. one evening in December 1967 he had picked up the reclusive multibillionaire Howard Hughes along a desolate road in the Nevada desert. Dummar, then 23 years of age, had reportedly found a solitary and lost Hughes lying on the side of a stretch of U.S. Highway 95 about 150 miles (240 km) north of Las Vegas, near the small town of Lida Junction. Leaving his mineworker's job at the Basic Magnesium Corp. mine in Gabbs, Nev., where he'd been employed at the time, Dummar had been traveling to Los Angeles to find his wife, Lynda, whom he had claimed had "run off with another man," when he'd spotted Hughes. According to Dummar, an unshaven, dirty and disheveled Hughes had refused medical attention and directed Dummar to take him to Las Vegas, dropping him off early the next morning at the rear of the Sands Hotel at his request, borrowing 25 cents from Dummar. It was at that time Hughes had revealed his true identity to Dummar.

After Hughes' death at age 70 in April 1976, a handwritten will was discovered in the headquarters of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, one that purported to leave "Melvin DuMar" one-sixteenth of Hughes' estate whose total estimated worth was over $2 billion. Dummar (whose inheritance would have been $156 million) had claimed a well-dressed man had dropped off the handwritten will, sealed in an envelope, on the desk of his service station, shortly after Hughes had died. Dummar, not knowing whether the will was real or not, then in turn delivered it to the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, who had also been left one-sixteenth of the estate in the will.

The document, which soon became popularly known as the "Mormon Will", had been ruled a forgery by a Nevada jury in June 1978 and Dummar received nothing from the Hughes estate. A 1980 feature film directed by Jonathan Demme and titled Melvin and Howard starring actors Paul Le Mat as Dummar and Jason Robards, Jr. as Hughes, further examines this story.

In early 2005, retired FBI agent Gary Magnesen claimed to have found new evidence that Dummar's story was true. Magnesen stated that Hughes's closest employees remembered the reclusive Hughes entering the Sands early one morning in December 1968 and stating that he had been picked up by Dummar in the desert. Furthermore, Hughes had purchased interests in mines located near the area where Dummar had originally found him. (Source: Deseret News, Salt Lake Tribune

Melvin is a cancer survivor, recently having a bone marrow transplant. He currently lives in Brigham City, UT, with his wife Bonnie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Dummar

You know, it sounds like something Howard would do.
He had no reason to trust people closest to him (obviously--look how he died!)
Any guy who'd bury stuff all over the country and opened hundreds of small bank accounts under assumed names ( and that money is still there, gathering interest)--I can see doing something like this!

When I was a teenager my family moved to Las Vegas. In those 'olden days' most cities had only the three major TV affiliates plus an independent station or two. This may be hard for our younger members to believe, but it's true. What's more, they would all go off the air at midnight or 1 AM. Those were truly primitive times!

In Las Vegas, however, Howard Hughes had purchased one of the local stations and had given orders that they were to remain on the air 24 hours a day. Howard liked to watch old black-and-white movies so that's what they played all night long. As a classic movie buff I felt as though I had died and gone to TV heaven!

I remember those days too, of just a few stations--and they'd always play the National Anthem when they shut down. "Memories...."
Speaking of Las Vegas, didn't Howard own/live on the top floor of one of the fancy hotels out there?
Can't recall the name...there's few good biographies out there about him because he was so reclusive and rarely talked with reporters even when he was more "normal".

More on Howard..his hotel purchases, from wikipedia:

Later years

Hughes' eccentricities have fascinated the public for years. The aging Howard Hughes moved with his entourage from hotel to hotel and from Beverly Hills to Boston before deciding to move to Las Vegas and become a casino baron. Less than a month after his November 27, 1966 arrival in a railroad car, Hughes made a public offer to buy the Desert Inn. The hotel's eighth floor became the nerve center of his empire, and the ninth floor penthouse became Hughes's personal residence.

Between 1966 and 1968, he also purchased several other hotels/casinos (Castaways, New Frontier, The Landmark Hotel and Casino, Sands and Silver Slipper) from the Mafia, transactions which ultimately ended mob control of the city's hotels and casinos. Hughes wanted to change the image of Las Vegas from its mobsters in gaudy silk suits and thousand-dollar-a-night callgirls to a more glamourous image. As Hughes wrote in a memo to an aide: "I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car". A chronic insomniac, Hughes bought several local television stations (including KLAS-TV) so that there would always be something for him to watch in the early hours of the morning.