Family finds unknown crawl space in California home — with 1 million pennies inside

A California family stumbled upon a crawlspace in their home while prepping for renovations but they had no idea they’d soon be the owners of over a million pennies.

A year ago, John Reyes, was cleaning out his father-in-law’s home in the Pico-Union neighborhood in Los Angeles with his wife, her twin sister and her cousin when they came across a crawl space they didn’t know existed, Reyes told McClatchy news in an interview.

Reyes and his wife who he met when he was 15, always knew about the basement but had no idea there was a crawlspace, Reyes said.

“I’ve been around her family for so many years and we always knew about the basement. It was kind of eerie looking so we never went down there but we knew there was so much stuff in the space so it was more of a headache of ‘we have to get this all cleaned out,’” the Ontario resident told McClatchy News.

Reyes said the crawl space was “basically hidden” and that he had found some loose pennies at first before uncovering the huge sum.

“Searching turned into finding boxes of pennies, then crates, then we came across I’ll say what I think is super old bank bags,” Reyes said. “Some of them even were closed with some led function they must’ve used back in the day.”

Reyes was told the house, built in the early 1900’s, was originally used as a bed and breakfast.

“My wife’s father and his brother moved from Germany when they were young lads,” Reyes told McClatchy News. “They lived in the house together for well over 50 years.”

The brothers, who Reyes describes as “war babies,” understood the importance of metals and the value they might hold in the future.

“They kept everything, like some of these banks don’t even exist anymore,” he said.

Reyes’ father-in-law died 10 years ago and his brother moved out of the home two years ago due to health reasons, Reyes said. That’s when the family got together to start cleaning out the home.

“We found these pennies about a year ago and I wanted to take the story to news outlets but we’re a private, lowkey family so after bringing it up for months I was able to get the green light from everyone,” the man said.

Now, Reyes and his family want to sell the pennies.

“We want to sell them but what we know is there’s this craze on the internet of people looking for a million dollar penny,” Reyes said. “We just want to sell them to someone who knows they could sell them for more than penny value.”