Before you play Powerball again, read these unforgettable Powerball winner stories about lost tickets, lucky finds, and last-minute discoveries.
Every Powerball player dreams about matching the winning numbers. The celebration, the phone calls, the plans for the future... that's the fun part to imagine.
But what if you realized you'd won, and then couldn't find your ticket?
It sounds like the plot of a movie, but it has happened more than once. Before these winners could celebrate, they had to tear through their homes, search their cars, and retrace their steps of the day in hopes of finding the one piece of paper that could change everything.
These real Powerball winner stories prove that sometimes the biggest challenge isn't winning. It's finding the ticket.
Connecticut school bus driver Russell Ruff experienced every Powerball player's worst nightmare after discovering his winning Powerball ticket had disappeared.
The ticket was worth $150,000, but no amount of searching turned it up. Weeks passed before an unexpected hero stepped in.
When the family's 16-year-old cat squeezed behind a bed and needed to be rescued, the bed was pulled away from the wall. Hidden behind the headboard was the missing Powerball ticket.
Talk about a lucky cat.
One Oklahoma couple nearly missed out on a $1 million prize because the winning ticket looked like nothing more than another piece of paper sitting on the kitchen table.
The ticket had been tossed aside with the day's clutter until the winner's wife decided to straighten up. Before throwing everything away, she checked the numbers and realized the forgotten ticket was actually worth seven figures.
It's a reminder that not every important document looks important at first glance.
Life gets busy, and checking Powerball tickets doesn't always make it to the top of the to-do list.
That was the case for an Australian couple who placed their ticket on the refrigerator with a magnet, intending to check it later. Days went by before they finally looked at the numbers and discovered they had won more than $13 million.
The ticket had been sitting in plain sight the entire time.
One Ohio man bought a Powerball ticket, slipped it into his pocket, and completely forgot about it.
Three months later, while cleaning out his wallet, he came across the ticket and decided to check the numbers. To his surprise, the forgotten slip of paper turned out to be worth $50,000.
Not every old receipt hiding in your wallet is worth keeping, but this one certainly was.
These Powerball winner stories all have happy endings, but plenty of ticket buyers aren't so lucky.
Millions of dollars in lottery prizes (of all sizes) go unclaimed across the United States every year because tickets are misplaced, forgotten, or never checked before the claim deadline passes. That's money that could have changed someone's life, all because a ticket was sitting in a drawer, tucked into a jacket pocket, or buried under a stack of papers.
While these stories all ended with happy surprises, they easily could have gone the other way. A ticket can't be replaced if it's lost, and it can't be claimed if it's never found. That's why so many Powerball players make it a habit to sign the back of their tickets and store them somewhere they'll remember after the drawing.
The next time you play Powerball, do yourself a favor. Put your ticket somewhere you'll remember, check your numbers after the drawing, and don't give up too quickly if it isn't where you expected. As these winners discovered, sometimes the winning ticket is hiding in the last place you'd think to look.