Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston has revealed how he had a brief run-in with Charles Manson only a year before the notorious cult leader ordered his followers to commit a series of shocking murders, including that of Hollywood actress Sharon Tate. 

Posting on Twitter in the aftermath of Manson’s death, Cranston explained how he had briefly seen the notorious criminal while horse riding as a 12-year-old, only a year before the 1969 murders.

“Hearing Charles Manson is dead, I shuddered. I was within his grasp just one year before he committed brutal murder in 1969”, Cranston wrote.

“Luck was with me when a cousin and I went horseback riding at the Spahn Ranch, and saw the little man with crazy eyes whom the other hippies called Charlie.”

Charles Manson

He previously elaborated on the story in a Hudson Union interview in 2016, explaining how he and a cousin heard desperate shouts of “Charlie’s on the hill!”

“Everybody looked around, and there was this frantic nervous energy going on, and they all jumped on horses and away they went”, he said. 

“We asked the old guy [Spahn] what was going on, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s happened before.’ We thought, ‘Well, Charlie must be someone important.’ 

He also described his shock a year later upon realizing that Manson was the cult leader of the murderous Manson Family.

““I saw his face on the news, and my jaw dropped. My cousin called me first and said, ‘Can you believe this?”, he said.

“The picture of Charlie Manson was the guy on the back of this horse. And we thought for a second, oh my god, what if? It was very freaky, to say the least.”

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