North Carolina man wins huge $150,000 lottery prize — it all started with his $5 Halloween tradition

Halloween is usually associated with monsters, witches, and everything ominous, but pumpkins carved for the festival are supposed to attract good spirits and bring luck. Although this has become just another ritual, it did change the fortunes of Roy Story from Perquimans County, who used the money he earned after selling pumpkins on Halloween, to buy a lottery ticket. "I raise a few pumpkins every year and sell them," Story told the North Carolina Education Lottery. He spent his earnings on purchasing a couple of $5 Xtreme Cashword lottery tickets and hit the jackpot worth $150,000.

Finding Luck on Halloween

Story told the lottery officials that someone gave him $10 for a pumpkin that he was selling for Halloween and he used the cash to buy the lottery ticket. The Xtreme Cashword lottery isn't an ordinary lottery as it requires participants to solve a crossword-like puzzle to win a prize. Ticket holders scratch off letters and get a prize based on how many words they can form. There is also a multiplier that increases their winnings further. Story bought the ticket from the Sun Farms gas station because he loves crossword puzzles. "I play them all,’" he said according to the official release. 

The top prize of $150,000 required players to form 10 unique words out of the letters that they found. Despite doing so, Story didn't realize at first, that he had hit the jackpot. “I didn’t have my glasses on, I thought it won $1,000," he shared. But he later found out that he had indeed won the top prize of $150,000. 

Story collected his prize from Cashword lottery's headquarters earlier this month, and walked away with $107,251 after taxes, as per the NC Education Lottery. Story expressed that he planned to buy a new truck using the winnings. 

In a somewhat similar case, some orange juice boxes brought lottery luck to a couple in 2018. Tayeb Souami who was forced by his wife to return some juice boxes walked back home with $315 million. The 56-year-old accountant who was heavily burdened with loan repayments and expenses of putting his daughter through college, became the sole winner of the Powerball lottery, as per Good Morning America.

He shared that after returning the juice, the lottery sign caught his eye, specifically because it promised a grand prize of $306 million. Thus he picked the numbers 3, 6, 9, 17, 56, and 25 for the Powerball. He had almost forgotten about the tickets but was luckily reminded of them the next day. When he checked the numbers in a 7-Eleven store, he couldn't believe that he had won. 

He told the lottery officials that he was shell-shocked and it took two long hours for him to calm down and finally drive home to his wife. The winner chose to take the lump sum amount of $183 million in cash, which he said would help him pay off his debt and pay for his daughter's college education.