The unbelievable story of Bill Morgan

Is it possible for one person to have the best and worst luck at the same time? 

In 1998, Australian Bill Morgan was living a remarkably normal life. He was a thirty-seven-year-old truck driver who lived in a trailer park outside of Melbourne and played the lotto once a week. He liked scratch-off tickets, or scratchies as they are known in Australia, even though he never won anything significant playing them.

Then, Morgan experienced some of the worst luck possible, followed by some of the best when he managed to die once and win the lottery twice in just one year.

The crash

Morgan's luck took a turn for the worse in June of 1998 when he was involved in a horrific car accident that nearly killed him on impact. Paramedics worked frantically to save his life, but the crash caused him to develop a potentially fatal heart condition.

Doctors gave him a drug to treat the heart condition without realizing that he was allergic to it. The medicine triggered a heart attack in Morgan; his heart stopped, and he was declared clinically dead for fourteen minutes before paramedics were able to revive him.

“They say you're clinically dead for seven minutes, so I was clinically dead twice,” Morgan told a reporter.

However, despite restarting his heart, Morgan was still in a dire condition. He slipped into a coma and needed life support machines to stay alive. Doctors thought that he had very little chance to survive and that he could be brain dead. They advised his family to turn off his life support machines and let him pass away, but they refused.

My sisters didn't want them to turn it off, and there was a specialist from the Alfred Hospital who said: 'We'll take him, but we want to use him as a guinea pig essentially and try different things, if one of them works, great.'

Fortunately for Morgan, the new treatments worked, and not only did he come out of his coma after fifteen days, but he had no lingering neurological or physical damage, and he was able to return to his old life. “When I was lying in hospital, I thought, gee, I mightn't survive this. I'm only 37 and, at 37, I've got so much to look forward to,” he told reporters at the time. Now that the worst part of his life was over, Morgan was ready to turn things around and enjoy the best part.

Win #1

After leaving the hospital, he proposed to his girlfriend of several years, Lisa Wells. He didn't think life could get any better when she said yes. Little did he know that his engagement was only the first step in an incredible run of luck.

After the trauma of the accident and his coma, Morgan was ready to restart his life. He found a new job, moved in with Lisa, and resumed buying a scratchie at his local liquor store every week. Several months after coming out of his coma, he purchased a $5 game called Scratch Match and Drive, a number match game with the top prize of a new car.

Morgan uncovered the ticket, and to his astonishment, he saw that he had won a brand new Toyota Corolla. “So I buy this Scratchie, I said out loud, 'I think I've won a car,' and sure enough, I had.”

A new car, a new job, and a new wife are certainly reasons to celebrate, but Morgan doesn't realize that his best luck is still to come.

Win #2

When word got out about his incredible story of going from dead to lottery winner, the local Nine News team decided to feature him in a story, which is when his luck went from good to incredible.

As part of the story, the team wanted to film a recreation of Morgan uncovering the car-winning ticket.

They thought it was a good luck story, so that's how it all started. And I went into the newsagent, and they filmed me walking up to the counter to get a $5 Scratchie, and one of the cameramen said, 'That'd make a good shot. We'll get you scratching it off.'

Morgan approached the clerk and picked a ticket at random. The cameras rolled as he uncovered it for the reenactment, and that's when something extraordinary happened. Morgan's eyes went wide when he saw the value of the ticket.

“I just won $250,000 - I'm not joking,” he says into the camera. “I think I'll have another heart attack.”

Defying the odds, he had won a second big prize from a scratcher ticket just weeks after he took home the Corolla.

He immediately called his fiance to share the good news. As a wedding present, he bought her a new house and invested the rest for his retirement.

The footage of Morgan realizing that he had just won a quarter million dollars (in Aussie dollars) went viral online, and twenty-two years later, he still gets approached by strangers on the street who tell him how much they love to watch him win.

It was an incredible time - 12 months before I had the win, the heart stopped, and my life was over for 14 minutes and 38 seconds.

Near-death winners

Shocking as it may sound, Morgan is not the only lottery player to survive a brush with death and then collect a significant prize.

A Croatian man named Frano Selak claims to have cheated death seven times, including being a passenger on a train that derailed into a river. At the age of 78, he won just over one million dollars playing the national lottery. He bought two houses before deciding he didn't want to live a materialistic life and gave away the rest of his money to family and friends.

Peter Lavery, a bus driver in Belfast, experienced Morgan's luck in reverse. In 1996, he won over $13 million playing the lottery. Twenty-seven years later, he was hit by a bus while walking through Belfast, but fortunately, he survived.

Today

Today, Morgan is 63 years old and still lives in Melbourne with his wife, Lisa. He still deals with health issues related to the crash, and his arthritis forced him into retirement, but he's still able to live a comfortable life based on the investments he made years ago with his lottery winnings.

Even though his life has had its share of ups and downs, he still feels blessed just to be alive.

I've had a bonus of 22 years, and that's the way you have to live your life. Every day, I get up and put on my shoes, and even if I'm not real well, I have a shuffle down the road and smell the roses, look at the sun, and think about how lucky I am.

While it's been decades since his last major lottery win, he still buys a scratchie every week because you never know when all of that good luck will come roaring back.