NC lottery player almost forgot about her ticket — but avoided the $1 million mistake

A North Carolina woman bought a $1 million lottery ticket — but didn’t know it for six weeks.

Patricia Scharville of Wake County put her winning ticket in a drawer and almost forgot about it, the N.C. Education Lottery said Saturday in a news release.

That was until she remembered the scratch-off and decided to check it with her husband earlier this month.

“We were sitting on the front porch, and we thought, ‘Let’s scratch off the tickets. We feel lucky tonight,’” Scharville told lottery officials.

When the couple discovered Scharville’s $1 million prize, they looked at the winning ticket in disbelief.

“I just handed it to him and said, ‘I think there’s something wrong with this ticket,’” Scharville told the N.C. Education Lottery. “He looked at the ticket and was like, ‘Oh my god.’”

Officials said Scharville hit the jackpot after a trip to the OHM Quick Shop convenience store in Wake Forest. That’s where she tried her luck on a $10 ticket for the $1,000,000 Bankroll game.

Scharville scored the game’s top prize and chose to take her money in a lump sum, officials said. She kept $424,503 after taxes.

“We’ve always said we wanted to have a beach house,” Scharville said after getting the big windfall.

It’s not the first time a lottery player has sat on a winning ticket.

In 2019, a North Carolina woman left a ticket in her glove box for a week before she realized it was worth $1 million.

And in South Carolina, a lottery player went on a frantic search when he couldn’t remember where he had stored his lucky ticket for “safe keeping,” McClatchy News reported.

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