Meet the winner of the Humane Society's Taylor Swift draw

Winner picks up tickets from Humane Society Meet the woman who won two tickets to Taylor Swift's Era's Tour through a Humane Society draw. CTV's Ashley Bacon reports.

A winner has been chosen as a massive fundraiser for the Kitchener Waterloo and Stratford Perth Humane Society comes to a close.

The animal welfare organization launched a 50/50 draw back in September, but the money wasn’t the focus: the winner was also promised a pair of highly coveted tickets for one of Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour stops in Toronto.

The humane society had been hoping to raise around $40,000. In the end, the grand total reached $725,000. Half that money will support the humane society’s work, while the other half will go to the winner.

Meet Eva Lin

The winning ticket was picked on Nov. 1, and for one Taylor Swift fan, her ‘wildest dreams’ came true.

“I don’t have words to even explain how I feel about this right now. And this is crazy, like I think I’m in a dream. Someone’s going to pinch me and it’s all fake, but I know it’s real now,” Eva Lin told CTV News Kitchener on Monday.

“Screaming, hyperventilating, everything you can possibly think of. Then I had to call my husband, call my brother. I’m like, ‘You guys all need to double check this one more time,’” Lin recounted the moment she found out she won. “[There was] a lot of screaming and crying that weekend.”

Lin said she bought 999 tickets for the draw and she bought the winning ticket on the last night before sales closed. Her tickets cost her $250, adding up to a tidy $362,250 profit after she claimed her big prize.

She travelled all the way from Ottawa to claim her prize. She found out about the contest from her brother, who lives in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.

Lin told CTV News she is a Taylor Swift superfan and has been to 11 concerts so far.

“We’ve been to every concert together since the Red Tour and we’ve been humming and hawing whether or not we should buy tickets,” she explained. “On the last day of the raffle, I’m like, you know what, go big or go home.”

Typically, she goes with her brother, but this time, she’ll be taking her husband.

As for the money, she’s not sure what she wants to spend it on yet.

“[I’ll] probably give some back and do a little bit of investments here and there but other than that, nothing, not much planned,” she said.