A woman in Oregon hit the $8 million jackpot at a Lucky Eagle Casino slot machine, but could not claim her money.
Veronica Castillo took her mother to the casino in Rochester, Washington last weekend. She put $100 in a machine and hit the jackpot — she thought.
“I was very excited, happy,” she told reporters. “Then I couldn’t believe it.”
The casino staff came over and told her the machine malfunctioned
“They shut off the machine, took it away, printed out a ticket and gave me $80.”
“To me, it’s cheating, may even be fraudulent,” Castillo said. “My first thought was, how many people has this happened to? They think they won, then going away empty-handed.”
Casino CEO John Setterstrom, who has been with the casino since before it opened in 1995, told reporters, this has never happened there before. He said he is working to get answers from the manufacturer and wants to keep Castillo as a customer.
And while they’ve offered her an apology and a weekend stay at the property, to include dining and free play, Castillo is in the process of getting an attorney.
Life and Luck: Are These the Luckiest People who Ever Lived?
Luck is not something tangible or perhaps not even real, yet we rely on it day after day in our lives. We say we are lucky to catch the bus, to avoid an accident, and we try it often online at gaming venues like the Royal Vegas Casino. The exciting online casino promotions for gaming entertainment are enough in themselves to make us feel lucky to have stumbled upon it – and the game variety the Royal Vegas has to offer can make us even more convinced of this feeling. But nothing we do, not finding $100 in the street or avoiding being hit by a car can make us feel as lucky as the people below.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi
Surviving a nuclear explosion at a distance of only a couple of miles from you may sound like the greatest luck ever. And how about surviving two? This is exactly what happened to Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only Japanese to have officially survived both the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki blasts.
A resident of Nagasaki, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on a three-month long business trip in Hiroshima in the summer of 1945. On August 6, he was preparing to return home, and on his way to the train station, when he had to return to his workplace to get his train pass. He was walking toward the docks when Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy on the city, only about two miles from him. He was seriously burned and temporarily blinded but he survived the blast.
After returning home on the 9th of August, he was telling about the blast to his supervisor when the Backscar dropped the Far Man on Nagasaki. Again, he was at a distance of about two miles from ground zero but this time he wasn’t hurt.
In March 2009, the Japanese government has officially recognized him as a survivor of both atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
Elmer Sherwin
Another double luck, but this time of the positive kind. Elmer Sherwin, a lifelong casino player, has spent a lot of his time playing the slots in Vegas yet never won a major amount – until the age of 75. It was then that Lady Luck smiled on him for the first time: he won the Megabucks slot machine’s jackpot worth $4.6 million. He used the money to travel the world and visit places he has never seen, then returned to Vegas again, and continued his life as a retiree and gambler. He never stopped playing the slots, though – it seems, he was after the prestige of hitting the Megabucks jackpot twice. And he did it again, in 2005, at the age of 92. This time, the jackpot he took home was worth $21 million.
Sherwin donated a good portion of his winnings to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort and shared the rest with his family.
