Waterloo Road's Jason Manford claims daughter saw ghost of murdered star

Comedian Jason Manford has claimed his daughter saw the ghost of a murdered actor standing behind him during a FaceTime call.

The star said he was sat in his dressing room in a West End theatre when his four-year-old daughter asked him "Daddy, who’s that man behind you?" He recalled how she then described seeing a crying soldier standing in the room at the Adelphi theatre on the Strand.

Jason, 43, says he told the theatre company manager about what happened and was then told that she had seen the ghost of the late William Terriss - who was murdered at the stage door in the late 1800s. Jason told the terrifying tale as he appeared on Alan Carr’s Life’s a Beach podcast.

Jason said the ghoulish experience occurred when he was playing the character of Adolfo Pirelli in Sweeney Todd. The Waterloo Road star explained: “There were lots of people in much bigger dressing rooms than I - I was in a small dressing room. And, like I said, dead by half eight, so sat by myself.

“So I’d FaceTime the kids, my youngsters were maybe three or four at that point. So one day I’m FaceTiming home and out of nowhere, my daughter just goes, ‘Daddy’, I went ‘What’, she went, ‘Who’s that man behind you?’”

Dad-of-four Jason - who starred in the production in 2012 - said he told his daughter "There’s nobody there, sweetheart," but she replied: "There is - there’s a man behind you.”

He continued: “Anyway, my wife at the time and her sister couldn’t see anything so we just moved on. A couple of days later, it happened again. [She’d ask] ‘Who’s the man behind you?’, I’d say, ‘There’s nobody there’. She was starting to get a bit upset because we were saying there wasn’t anybody there.”

Jason said that when his daughter told him a third time the man was there he asked her what the man looked like and “She said, ‘He’s dressed as a soldier and he’s crying,’ She’s four, so I went, okay, that’s weird. So I kept the door open after then you know any time anyone walked past, [I’d ask] ‘do you want a brew?’. Anyway, I mentioned it to the company manager a few days later, I said, I said, oh, weird story, funny story - I went with that angle.

“And when I told him, he went, ‘Oh, that’ll be William’. I said, ‘Oh f**k, what do you mean? Who’s William?’ So I Google his story and he’s on that. He was an actor and performer, director, all sorts." Jason concluded: “[In] 1900 or something like that, he was the star of a show that he’d written... [he was] murdered at the stage door, stabbed at the stage door. The stage door that’s under my dressing room.

“Murdered by his understudy at stage door. And he was in a show that night that he’d written called The American Secret Service, where he was playing a soldier.” William Terriss was murdered by the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre in 1897.

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