When a piece of heavy machinery ground to a halt at a waste disposal facility, the operator had no idea he’d just uncovered one of the most hauntingly human stories anyone at that landfill had ever seen.
The object was enormous — a silver sphere, nearly the size of a small car, buried beneath layers of ordinary garbage. It was immovable, inexplicable, and unlike anything workers had encountered in years of service. The site manager ordered operations to stop. Authorities were called. A crane was brought in to transport the anomaly to a secure inspection hangar, where trained inspectors suited up in full protective gear before approaching with industrial cutting equipment.
X-ray equipment couldn’t penetrate the thick metallic shell. It took mechanical saws, sparks flying, to finally break through.
What spilled out from inside wasn’t dangerous materials, hidden contraband, or anything investigators had theorized. It was paper. Millions of thin, colorful, scratched-over slips — lottery tickets, compressed under enormous pressure into a solid, fused mass.
Forensic analysts estimated the ball contained over 930,000 individual losing scratch-off tickets.
Investigators traced the object to the estate of Howard Pressfield, a 71-year-old man who had lived alone and died quietly in his home weeks before the discovery. Financial records told a story that was difficult to read. Over the course of three decades, Pressfield had purchased lottery tickets compulsively and obsessively — draining a full pension, maxing out multiple lines of credit, and taking a second mortgage on a home he had once owned outright.
By the time of his death, he owed more than $260,000 with nothing remaining to his name.
In his shed, investigators found a modified hydraulic press. He had spent years — methodically, privately — crushing his losing tickets into an ever-growing ball, wrapping each new layer in aluminum foil. Whether he did it to hide his losses from himself, or simply as a ritual of grief, no one will ever know.
Analysts sampled 10,000 tickets at random from the mass. Not one was a winner.
The Hidden Cost of “Just One More”
Compulsive lottery gambling is a recognized form of gambling disorder, and experts say it often goes undetected precisely because lottery tickets carry a veneer of harmlessness. They’re sold at checkout counters. They’re given as birthday gifts. The entry price is low, but the psychological loop — the near-miss, the anticipation, the ritual of scratching — can become deeply compulsive for vulnerable individuals.
According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, millions of Americans meet the criteria for problem gambling, with lottery products among the most commonly cited. For people like Pressfield, the tickets aren’t really about money at all. They’re about hope — the intoxicating belief that the next one could change everything.
When it doesn’t, some people stop. Others press their tickets into a ball and keep going.
Howard Pressfield left no family, no will, and no note. Just a monument to three decades of hoping — crushed, sealed, and quietly buried under someone else’s trash.