Hold Up, Bryan Cranston Had a Near-Miss With Charles Manson?

Today’s news has been peppered with dark and macabre mentions of Charles Manson, the infamous mastermind of mass murder who died in prison last night at age 83. More than almost any killer, Manson made a horrific mark on the culture of the 1960s and influenced film, music, and TV culture for decades after. One remembrance of Manson that has taken everybody by surprise comes from actor Bryan Cranston. The Breaking Bad and Last Flag Flying star tweeted a bafflingly casual mention of a run-in with Manson:

First of all, “I was within his grasp” is just good writing. Get this man a first-look script deal at a major studio, pronto. Second of all, a 1968 encounter with the Manson Family at Spahn Ranch while on horseback?!?! (Third of all, Cranston misspelled Spahn Ranch, get this man an editor for that first-look script deal.) Anybody who’s read a Manson bio — or listened to Karina Longworth’s “You Must Remember This” podcast series on the Manson murders — knows that Spahn Ranch was where the Manson family holed up while they gathered and planned their series of crimes that would culminate in the Tate-LaBianca murders

This sounds like a shocking admission, but it’s a story Cranston has told before. The Daily Beast relayed this tale only last year:

As the story goes, a 12-year-old Cranston, who grew up in the Canoga Park section of Los Angeles, was riding horses at Spahn Ranch—a former film set for Hollywood Westerns owned by George Spahn. The octogenarian allowed the Manson Family to live there rent-free in exchange for doing various chores, including helping run his horse-rental business.

“I was very young but old enough to be on my own,” remembers Cranston. “Me and my female cousin, who is a year-and-a-half older than I am, we were dropped off to go horseback riding while my mom and uncle went off and did something else. So we were checking out our horses at Spahn Ranch, which is very close to where I was raised. We noticed that the people around there were all strange in their own kind of interesting way. There was an old guy [Spahn] checking us in and some guy in his twenties came in yelling, ‘Charlie’s on the hill! 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. We asked the old guy what was going on, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s happened before.’ We thought, well, Charlie must be someone important.

“So we get our horses and go along the trail, and about, oh, 20 minutes after we left the barn area where the horses were gathered, we see this trail of horses coming back,” he goes on. “There were about eight or so people, and there was a man in the middle on a horse but he wasn’t holding his own reins—there was someone on the horse in front holding the reins—and Charlie, I guessed, was this comatose, bearded, long-haired guy with big eyes riding as if he’s just stuck to the back of a horse. Totally zoned out. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. My cousin turned back to me and said, ‘Wow, that guy’s weird.’ When we passed him and their whole group, she turned around again and said, ‘That must be Charlie,’ and I said, ‘Yeah… and Charlie’s freaky!’ We didn’t think anything of it.

And while we’re not sure if an at-a-distance glimpse of a zonked-out Charlie Manson on horseback officially counts as a brush with death, we agree it is, indeed, really freaky.