Today we take a look at the strangest lottery draws throughout history
The human obsession with luck, fate, and getting rich quick is nothing new, which is why playing the lottery is so much fun. But long before the days of multi-state or provincial powerballs and digital scratch-offs, lotteries were bizarre, high-stakes social experiments. From using human lives as currency to trading prime real estate for a lucky ticket, history is packed with draws that make modern jackpots look entirely mundane.
Here is a journey through some of history’s strangest, most chaotic, and deeply unsettling lotteries.
Most people buy a lottery ticket hoping to win a life-changing sum of money. If you lived in Rome during the reign of Emperor Heliogabalus (218–222 AD), you bought a ticket just hoping to survive the draw.
Heliogabalus is remembered as one of Rome’s most eccentric and erratic rulers, and his approach to public lotteries was no exception. During public festivals, the emperor would have lottery tickets thrown into the massive crowds. The prizes were printed on small tokens or slips of parchment, but there was a catch: the prizes ranged from the spectacularly luxurious to the deeply disturbing.
A lucky Roman might catch a ticket that won them ten camels, a haul of gold, a beautifully crafted chariot, or a slice of prime estate. However, the next person over might catch a ticket that won them:
• Ten dead flies
• A death sentence
• Six poisonous snakes
• A basket of rotting meat
In 1567, Queen Elizabeth I found herself in a tight spot. England needed a massive influx of cash to rebuild its naval fleets, repair its harbors, and expand its global trade routes. Raising taxes was politically dangerous, so Elizabeth and her advisors came up with a brilliant alternative: England’s first-ever national lottery.
Launched in 1569, this wasn't just a raffle; it was a massive, nationwide campaign. To entice the public, the Crown offered an astronomical jackpot of £5,000 (an incredible fortune at the time), paid out in a mix of cold hard cash, beautiful silver plate, tapestry, and fine linen. But the strangest part of the 1569 lottery wasn’t the physical prizes—it was the legal immunity. Every person who bought a ticket was granted temporary immunity from arrest for certain crimes. If you committed a minor offense or owed money to creditors, buying a lottery ticket gave you a legal shield for a limited window of time surrounding the drawing.
Because tickets were incredibly expensive (roughly the equivalent of several weeks' wages for an ordinary labourer), entire villages, guilds, and churches pooled their money together to buy a single ticket under a collective alias. The drawing itself was a monumental event, lasting for days outside the gates of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Though it took two years to sell enough tickets to actually hold the draw, it successfully funded the ships that would later defend England against the Spanish Armada.
Not all strange lotteries are fun historical quirks; some are born from greed and tragedy. One of the most infamous lotteries in American history took place in Georgia in 1832, and the prizes being raffled off were the ancestral homes of indigenous people.
Following the discovery of gold in north Georgia and the signing of the Indian Removal Act by President Andrew Johnson, the state of Georgia decided to aggressively seize millions of acres of land belonging to the Cherokee Nation. To distribute this stolen land to white settlers quickly and systematically, the state organized the Cherokee Land Lottery.
The state was mapped out into tens of thousands of fractional lots (usually 40 or 160 acres). White male citizens of Georgia who paid a small registration fee had their names put into a giant drum, while the land lot numbers were placed in another.
Winners didn't just receive raw wilderness; many won fully functional plantations, cultivated fields, and fully furnished homes that Cherokee families were forced to vacate at gunpoint. This lottery was a highly organized, bureaucratic machine that directly fueled the forced displacement known as the Trail of Tears. It stands as a stark reminder of how lotteries have been used by governments as tools of conquest and demographic engineering.
Before the mid-1700s, most lotteries involved drawing physical items or specific ticket numbers. But in Genoa, Italy, a completely different system was born out of local political elections—one that gave rise to the modern "pick your numbers" style of gambling.
Every year, five members of the Genoese Senate were chosen by random draw out of a pool of 90 names. Local citizens began betting heavily on which five names would be pulled. Seeing a massive financial opportunity, a clever entrepreneur named Benedict d'Oronco realized you didn't need the politicians at all; you could just replace the names with numbers from 1 to 90.
This gave birth to the Lotto, and it quickly became an absolute psychological obsession across Europe.
The lottery has taken many shapes over the millennia. While today we look at a lottery ticket as a harmless, cheap dream of early retirement, history shows us that the mechanics of the random draw have been used to build navies, dismantle nations, and toy with human survival.
Whenever humanity decides to let the rolling of dice or the drawing of a ticket dictate reality, things are bound to get incredibly strange.