Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Anyone at the Raceway gas station and convenience store on Carrollton Boulevard in Isle of Wight County on a recent Friday night would have heard a ruckus.

Gayla Guishard had just bought and scratched a Virginia Millions scratcher ticket from the Virginia Lottery. When she asked the store owners, who happened to be there, to check the ticket, they discovered it was a $1 million winner.

“I just kind of screamed!” Guishard later told Lottery officials. “We were all in there screaming!”

But when some people heard the commotion and went in the store to see what was wrong, they didn’t get an answer.

“We said, ‘Nothing!’, and we got really quiet,” Ms. Guishard said.

This wasn’t the first time the Smithfield woman had a big Virginia Lottery win to scream about. In 2021 she won $100,000 in Virginia’s New Year’s Millionaire Raffle.

Virginia Millions is one of dozens of scratcher games available from the Virginia Lottery. This is the second top prize claimed in the game, which means one more top prize is unclaimed. The chances of winning the top prize are 1 in 612,000. The chances of winning any prize in this game are 1 in 3.5.

Guishard had the choice of taking the full $1 million before taxes in annual payments over 30 years or a one-time cash option of $571,000 before taxes. She chose the cash option.

She’s not the only winner. The store receives a $10,000 bonus from the Lottery for selling the winning ticket.

All Virginia Lottery profits go to K-12 education in Virginia. Guishard lives in Isle of Wight County, which received more than $3.2 million in Lottery funds for K-12 education last fiscal year. Statewide as of fiscal year 2023, the Lottery had raised more than $867 million for K-12 education, making up approximately 10% of Virginia’s total K-12 school budget.