Bryan Cranston Could Have Been One of Charles Manson's Victims

Long before he was Walter White or Heisenberg, Bryan Cranston was just a boy hanging out in southern California. That's where he and his cousin stumbled upon the infamous Charles Manson and his cult only months before the group would commit some of the most infamous murders in American history. Manson died in prison this week, but Cranston still remembers the encounter far too well.

Via Page Six.

Actor Bryan Cranston says he’s lucky to be alive after a run-in with Charles Manson decades ago.

“Hearing Charles Manson is dead, I shuddered. I was within his grasp just one year before he committed brutal murder in 1969,” the “Breaking Bad” star tweeted Monday. “Luck was with me when a cousin and I went horseback riding at the Span Ranch, and saw the little man with crazy eyes whom the other hippies called Charlie.”

Cult leader Manson, who was convicted along with his Manson Family followers of killing seven people over two horrific nights in 1969, died Sunday at the age of 83.

Cranston has previously talked about running into Manson before he and and his crew committed the killings, when Cranston was a 12-year-old growing up in the Canoga Park section of Los Angeles.

The future star was riding horses with his teenage cousin at Spahn Ranch — a ranch used for filming Western movies and TV shows whose owner George Spahn allowed Manson and his murderous acolytes to live there rent-free in exchange for performing odd jobs.

Cranston and his cousin were checking out their horses when a man in his 20s started yelling, “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,” Cranston told the Daily Beast last year. “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.’ ”

Cranston’s cousin, who was about a year-and-a-half older than he, would have been about the same age as Dianne Lake, Manson’s youngest devotee, when she joined his “family” at the age of 14 in 1967.

Cranston and his cousin rode out to find “Charlie” and see what all the fuss was about — and there they found a drugged-out Manson, who still oozed charisma despite being whacked out of his gourd, Cranston recalled.

Read the rest of the story at Page Six.

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