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The Bum’s Countdown



Estimated reading time — 3 minutes

There’s a strange phenomenon I’ve noticed on several television reports from the early 1960’s onwards. There may be more before, but since I got my first television in 1962, I can’t say for sure. I would like to post this here to ask if anybody else has noticed, or seen any others.

It started in the early 1960s. Specifically, the Kennedy assassination. I was watching a broadcast by ABC of his final precession, and whilst the reporter was talking to the camera, amongst the crowd, I noticed something quite odd. A very scruffily dressed man standing quite a distance behind the reporter was staring right into the camera. He wore the typical attire of a homeless person. Dirty brown trench coat, a dark green woollen hat, and noticeably long facial hair. This wasn’t what creeped me out however. There was a massive amount of people around, and I just assumed this homeless man was here to watch the parade. The fact he was staring dead on at the camera motionless was quite off-putting though.

A little while into the report, he finally moved. He raised his arm in front of himself, and put him hand up, giving the number “5” with his digits. A few seconds after he did this, there was a loud bang, and a massive commotion in the crowd. The man stayed absolutely still, with his hand still outstretched, but the reporter and camera man moved to get a better look at what had happened, and the man was no longer in shot.

Kennedy had been killed.

Some years went by, and along the way, I seemed to forget about the strange homeless man from the Kennedy report. That was, until 1980. I had returned from work, and was absolutely shattered. My wife was laying out our evening meal, and I was just catching up on current events on TV. I changed to a particularly interesting report about a heat wave that was currently affecting some of the states down South. This concerned me, as my wife has relatives there, and I feared for their wellbeing. The news reporter was billing this as “The worst American heat-wave in decades.” At that point, I noticed him again.

In the distance, over the reporter’s left shoulder, was the homeless man from the Kennedy report. I didn’t notice him at first, and it was his initial movement that drew my eyes to him. As the reporter spoke, the homeless man lifted his hand once again, and signalled the number “4” with his fingers. I was more alarmed at the fact that the man seemed ”exactly” the same as when I had spotted him in the Kennedy report almost 20 years before. He was dressed the same, still wearing his trench coat, despite the reporter claiming that the heat was unbearable. He himself had removed his suit jacket, and had rolled his shirt sleeves up.

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That man has made a couple more appearances in news reports that I know of. One in 2001, during a report of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centres, where he held up 3 fingers, and more recently during reports of the devastation Hurricane Sandy caused in New York, where he held up 2 fingers. Each time, in all 4 of these news reports, he has been dressed exactly the same, and shows absolutely no emotion. The people around him seem to pay no mind to him, and each time he just stares directly into the camera lens, until the report ends, or the cameraman moves the camera away from him.

I have written this because of his appearance in the Sandy reports. It is now 2012, and I know for a fact that DVD recording and such has become a lot more common. I have never owned a recording device myself, and so I haven’t been able to capture the man in any reports. Other people may have though, so I urge you to flick back through any recordings of the news reports you may have, and try and screen grab an image of the man if possible, so that we may identify him, and find out exactly why he is showing up at these events.

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Right now I am very scared though. And I think it’s plausible that you all should be too. It’s obvious at this point that this man does not age, and appears in news reports of disasters- both natural and man-made. Not to mention, with the exception of the Kennedy assassination, many people have been injured and killed in said disasters, and it’s getting worse. It’s also obvious that this man is counting down to something in each one of the reports he has appeared in. And worryingly, he’s down to number 1.

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Credit To – Cooperwithacamera

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50 thoughts on “The Bum’s Countdown”

  1. I thought the fact that it was 2012 was enough to imply impending doom, whether it was just the US or the world. 2012 was rumored to be something of that nature, correct?

  2. i swear i have seen a homeless man like this before when I went to Paris and the weird thing is when i looked at him he put 5 fingers up all day i was confused on what that meant. But lol, it was kinda creepy that i saw this though

  3. So, the character is watching the Kennedy assassination on the news, and the thing that sticks out to him is a guy looking into the camera and raising five fingers. We all see this all the time on the news. It’s called waving.

    I doubt he would have remembered it 20 years later.

    I was expecting a video at the end of the pasta. There is every chance a video like this exists, if not for the Kennedy assassination then certainly for other disasters. Would have added quite a lot to the story, I think.

  4. Very well written. It was short, sweet and left the reader to draw their own conclusions. You actually made me google some videos of the assissination just to make sure it wasn’t real. Good job.

  5. at first i was thinking that the “bum” was counting down to a disaster that was going to happen to the man that’s why he was the only one that noticed him

  6. brown trench coat

    When disaster comes, he’s there. He brings the storm in his wake, and he has one constant companion. Death.

    (Allons-y!)

  7. I really agree with Star Kindler’s comment.

    Uhm. I didn’t really like how the disaster’s the bum seemed to be orchestrating were so different. It’s implied he assassinated the president, but what I took that to mean was that he was involved with the person who shot the president. AKA: It was a group of people doing something. Fast forward and he’s causing things like a Heat Wave. So he went from being part of a group/something to do with a being to being able to control weather. And then it jumps back and forth, Super Storm Sandy is weather, and the World Trade Center is obviously a plot that people came up with.

    If he could predict disasters, that would be different, but to imply he has power over and is the one causing these disasters means that you should stick to one kind of thing: either he’s in a group/controls people or he has magic or something.

    I’m also not sure how much I believe that only one person, the narrator, would notice something like someone staring at a camera and making a hand gesture.

  8. [name goes here]

    I really love the concept of having the good sir in question be a re-occurring antagonist. This is a fantastic pasta!

    1. WHO WAS PHONE HAhahahHAHAHaahahHAhaha!!!!!!!1111!!!! its so funy, hahahaha who was phone hahaha lol lol lol!!!!111!!!!

      ;-)

  9. Thanks for the feedback guys! I intended for what the bum was counting down to to be very vague. I wanted to leave it to your imaginations. Personally, I had a kind of doomsday scenario in my head when I wrote it, or perhaps just another MASSIVE disaster.

    Anyways, thanks for the opinions and ideas, I will definitely return to this pasta at some point and change it up a bit before publishing it again.

    1. Username, or no username, there is no name user

      Agreed, this pasta is making me look up a report of one of these events, I’m probably gonna go with Kennedy

  10. While the idea here is interesting, the story itself is too ambiguous to really capture my attention. The whole “vague doom is coming” thing doesn’t have a lot of bite to it, unless we have some sort of idea what that vague doom is. Not necessarily spelled out, but just enough of a hint so that our imagination can do the rest for us.

    Now, you mentioned in the story how lots of people died in each disaster, except for the Kennedy one where only Kennedy died. I think you actually sort of had something there. You could have showed how more and more people died in each disaster, almost as if the Bum, or whatever he was warning us about, was gaining power. The disasters picked also felt kinda random and American-centric. Should the whole world be worried about the bum? Just the USA? Does every country have their own bum doing a countdown (now that would kinda cool/eerie)? Still, I feel the idea itself is interesting and could be worked into something even creepier.

    1. I’m the one that wrote this. I also go by the name “Elmarco”. Thanks for the feedback, and I totally get what you mean about it being a very American oriented story.
      If I ever rewrite it, I’m thinking of getting rid of a couple of the USA events, and possibly replacing them with that earthquake in Japan a while back, and possibly something that’s happened in Europe.
      Shifting the events around so that they go in order of the death toll is actually a very neat idea. I never even intended for the Bum to be “absorbing power” from the disasters death tolls, but that’s a damn good idea!

        1. The Whetters' Farce

          I saw him holding up 1 fingers during a report of the Declaration of a state of war from North Korea

      1. When you started with the Kennedy assassination, I assumed I would be reading about more deaths of famous people. You guys are onto something, starting with the death of one and growing from there… but perhaps the first one should be someone unknown? Or a few unknown? And maybe stick to either freak accidents, natural disasters, or murders (well, maybe not murders, because when they get solved, it kinda kills any fiction surrounding it when they reveal the killer). The earthquake idea is a good one, maybe tsunamis, Mt. St. Helens, etc, possibly a different disaster each time. You could do so much with this premise! And it would sink in deeper if you DID pick someone you found in a news report, people like Jay^ might be interested enough to investigate!

        1. The Whetters' Farce

          actually if he was holding up 5 fingers that means he must’ve gone through alot of events in the history to get there, for example the olden day Crusades (the fact that kennedy counted 5 means something really huge that Kennedy was going to do was interrupted, like for example seeing about sending alot more funding to cancer/diease research.

      2. HEY HEY HEY IT'S SLENDY!

        I think–maybe–after each event, the bum looks more civilized. Also, the only way you can tell it is him (besides his face)is his eyes, they seem dead like no one is behind them

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