A couple have unearthed a million copper pennies while clearing out an old family home.
You come across all manner of weird and wonderful things while clearing out houses.
Anyone who has visited a clearance yard or had to clear out an attic knows all manner of strange things can surface, especially in older houses that have been lived in for a long time.
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It could be a big find, like a particularly rare first edition book or valuable artefact. There's also the more unsettling, like collections of taxidermy, human remains, or even occult artefacts.
Some mean you have to call the police, others an exorcist.
However, John Reyes and his family have come across a fascinating and wholly unexpected find in his father-in-law's home.
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It turned out that there was a collection of one million copper pennies stashed away in the house. Even taking them at face value that's a pretty decent haul of $10,000.
But these are not just any ordinary pennies. As they haven't even been touched for decades, let alone catalogued, there's no knowing whether a particularly rare coin is buried somewhere in the pile. Given that they are older pennies, the collection has been valued at $25,000, some 2.5x its face value.
Mr Reyes told NBC LA: “These have literally been untouched for decades, and I think that’s the super unique part about it.
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“We started going through the arduous process of looking at the pennies and that quickly turned into, ‘We don’t know what we are doing.’ And then we decided to pop open a couple of beers and have those instead."
The family believe that Mr Reyes' father-in-law could have assembled the collection to sell the metal due to the coins' high copper content. The only problem with this collection is finding somewhere to store it.
Many of us have felt the embarrassment of having to pay in a pub with small change, so imagine having to find a way to look after a million pennies. It's a fair bit more than just emptying the loose change jar!
Coins can fetch some incredible prices at auction. In 2010, a penny from 1943 was sold at auction for $1.7 million, or 170 million times its face value. Not a bad mark up.
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The most expensive coin sold at auction according to the Guinness Book of World Records is the 1933 Double Eagle. In 2021, the coin with a face value of $20 sold for a whopping $18,872,250 at Sotheby's in New York.
They may not have quite struck gold, but copper isn't bad either.
Kit Roberts