Silver dollars

The four silver dollars were among the few possessions Ben Hanscom's father left him before dying when Ben was four. Ben carried them for years, a tangible link to a father he barely remembered. When the Losers' Club decided they needed silver ammunition to kill the creature haunting Derry, Ben volunteered his inheritance without hesitation. The coins were not merely currency; they were relics of a lost parent, and offering them up for the fight represented a profound act of trust and commitment to his new friends.

The Making of the Silver Slugs

Initially, Bill Denbrough, Richie Tozier, and Ben Hanscom researched how to cast silver bullets, spending hours in the Derry Public Library studying metallurgy. They soon realized that making functional bullets was beyond their skill and equipment. Instead, they decided to melt down one silver dollar and pour it into two small bearing molds, creating solid silver slugs roughly the size of ball bearings. The work was done in Zack Denbrough's workshop on the night of July 23, 1958, using a blowtorch and a cut-down mortar shell as a crucible. Ben, who had the steadiest hands and the clearest understanding of the process, oversaw the casting while the others watched in tense silence. The resulting slugs were imperfect—one still showed faint traces of the date "1925" and the other bore wavering lines from Lady Liberty's hair—but they were real silver, and the children believed that was what mattered.

The Silver Slugs in Battle

The slugs were given to Beverly Marsh, who had proven herself the most accurate shot with Bill's Bullseye slingshot. On July 25, 1958, at 29 Neibolt Street, Beverly fired one of the silver slugs into the face of the werewolf that had emerged from the bathroom drain. The shot struck the creature's snout, causing it to scream in agony and retreat into the sewer. The silver did not kill It, but it drove It back and proved that the children's belief in the power of silver could actually wound the monster. The second slug was never used in that confrontation; it remained in Beverly's pocket as a backup that was never needed.

The Fate of the Remaining Coins

Of the four original silver dollars, one was consumed in the casting of the slugs. A second was given away by Ben to Ricky Lee, the bartender at the Red Wheel in Hemingford Home, Nebraska, just before Ben flew back to Derry in 1985. Ben gave three cartwheels to Ricky Lee's children, but the fourth—the one that had been melted down—was already gone. The remaining two coins were never accounted for in the narrative; their fate is left ambiguous, perhaps lost or spent in the intervening years. The silver dollars thus serve as a symbol of sacrifice: Ben gave up a piece of his personal history to arm his friends against a supernatural evil, and the act of melting down the coin transformed a keepsake into a weapon of belief.