Lottery Winner Wore ‘Scream’ Mask to Claim Prize

A Jamaican man who won $100 million in the lottery had a most unusual way of accepting his prize money: by putting on the mask of the infamous “Ghostface” murder from the Scream movies and TV series to accept his Super Lotto check!

Clearly valuing his privacy, the man (identified only as “A. Campbell”) came to Spanish Court Hotel in St. Andrew Parish, Kingston, Jamaica, in the Ghostface mask, and “a light-brown overhaul and black leather gloves,” according to Loop. It had taken 54 days for Campbell to claim his ticket, causing the Super Lotto parent company, Supreme Ventures Limited, to put out ads urging the winner not let the 90-day deadline to claim winnings expire.

In Campbell’s own telling, he picked his winning numbers (10, 14, 16, 25, 27, and super ball 5) from a dream that he had. His delay in collecting seems to have been due to the fact that his unprecedented good luck also came with a serious hit of bad: Campbell claims he fell seriously ill, just after receiving his winning ticket!

“I looked at my ticket and ran into my bathroom and said, ‘I won! I won!’ From the day I found out that I won, I’ve been sick,” Campbell said. “My head hurt me for three days because I was thinking so much. [Wondering] if what I’ve been longing for really come true. I had a belly ache for two weeks, sometimes I feel so much pain I forgot that I had won.”

Apparently, this illness wasn’t the only trouble that Campbell has had: he described his life as “a struggle,” and is asserting that he wants to use his winnings to change that bad fortune: “I want to get a house, I want to get a nice house. I haven’t found it yet, but I’ll be looking for one soon.”

Clearly the circumstances of Campbell’s life make him feel as though having his identity fully out there would be too much of a risk. Still, using the Ghostface Scream mask is a pretty aggressive way of doing it. The mask first debuted in Wes Craven’s 1996 horror satire, in which two deranged high school boys terrorize their town and a young girl named Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), playing on tropes from the horror / slasher genre. The Ghostface mask was used to conceal the fact that the killer was actually not one, but two people working together – a twist that ironically became its own gimmicky trope of the horror genre, thereafter.

The Scream TV series was airing on MTV for two seasons. Season 3 will supposedly reboot the series, but it has been held up by some convoluted legal issues, with fans still waiting to learn the official premiere date.