Bill Morgan

In 1999, 37 year old Bill Morgan was a truck driver living in a travel trailer in Australia. Who after an accident died for fourteen minutes and fell into a coma, which he miraculously came out of after 12 days.

Not being interested in driving truck anymore, he then found a different job and- as near death experiences are wont to do, it made him reevaluate his life, including within a year making the decision to propose to Lisa Wells, his long-time girlfriend.

She accepted.

No doubt feeling pretty lucky not only to be alive, but to have his girlfriend agree to marry him, he bought a scratch lottery ticket. The result? He won a car worth about $17,000 Australian (today about $23,903 US and $25,099 Australian).

Normally winning a car isn’t a big enough story to get the media to pay attention to you, but given that Morgan had recently been clinically dead for 14 minutes, the local Melbourne news decided to do a feature on him.

In the process, they asked Morgan if he wouldn’t mind buying another lotto ticket and then scratching it off on camera for them, as a sort of re-enactment of his winning scratch.

He happily obliged. After scratching the ticket on camera, though, he stopped, looked at the camera, and rather than be excited and saying something like “I just won a car” as part of the reenactment, he instead said “I just won $250,000. I’m not joking!” This was the jackpot for that particular scratch lotto he was playing (today about $369,102 Australian or $351,526 US ). [1]

1. THE MAN WHO DIED, CAME BACK TO LIFE AND WON THE LOTTO TWICE- THE SECOND TIME WHEN REENACTING THE FIRST WIN FOR THE MEDIA, by Daven Hiskey (30 October, 2013), Today I found out