It makes pennies multiply in the dark. It is a close cousin of the paperclip monster. Its arch rival is any machine that can sort, count, wrap, or otherwise organize pennies. When it wants to be especially vile, it will transform half of the pennies from American to Canadian currency, making the coins worth even less, although they look deceptively similar and even weigh about the same. It punishes disobedient pennies by sending them in the direct path of a vacuum cleaner, often rendering the victims deeply scarred and choking the vacuum cleaner at the same time, a double guilty pleasure.

Experts Say It Could Be The Penny Monster

An area man was found buried alive for 48 hours beneath a mountain of pennies. Jeremy Lake of Buffalo Grove lived to tell his story:

“It started out small. I found a few pennies in the backs of drawers, behind the cushions of my car. Then, the other night I went to sleep. I kept hearing this strange jingling sound, like coins. But I ignored it. I thought I was dreaming, but I felt something pushing me in my sleep out of my bed. I ended up in the bathtub, luckily.”

Mr. Lake survived on water he drank straight from the tap. Concerned neighbors called police after they heard a pounding sound coming from the upstairs apartment. That would turn out to be Jeremy banging his fist on the wall of his bathroom. Firefighters excavated the 25-year-old man from the deadly pile of coins with special rescue equipment.

A volunteer bucket brigade helped Jeremy and his rescuers remove the coins from his apartment. The change was dumped into the bed of a neighbor’s pickup truck and was deposited by the bagful into the CoinStar machine of a local Dominick’s supermarket and converted into cash. For all their trouble, Jeremy and his twelve new friends will split exactly $153.79.