Episode 219: A Haunting at the Adelphi Theatre and Mysterious Death of Chuck Morgan

The girls are back, and this week’s episode is a perfect little haunted-theater, true-crime anxiety spiral. Cute? No. Creepy? Extremely. First, Monique tells the story of British comedian Jason Manford, who got cast in the West End revival of Sweeney Todd at London’s historic Adelphi Theatre. Every night after getting his throat slashed onstage, Jason would clean off the fake blood and FaceTime his wife and twin daughters before bed. How sweet. Until his three-year-old daughter asked, “Daddy, who’s that man behind you?” A tall man with dark hair, a mustache, and a soldier’s uniform: a description that matched William Terriss, the beloved Victorian actor who was stabbed to death at the Adelphi stage door in 1897 while wearing a Union Army captain’s costume. The theatre ghosts really said: yes, and? Then Amy brings us into the 1977 death of Charles “Chuck” Morgan, a Tucson escrow company president whose case is so suspicious it feels personally insulting that anyone tried to rule it as a suicide. Chuck disappeared, came home three days later missing a shoe, bound in plastic handcuffs, unable to speak and writing that he had been kidnapped and tortured. He hinted at a secret government identity, got paranoid (naturally), wore a bulletproof vest, carried a gun and told his family he had written a letter naming who was responsible if anything happened to him. Then he disappeared again. Nine days later, a mystery woman called “Green Eyes” phoned his wife with an ominous Bible passage and soon after, Chuck was found in the desert wearing his bulletproof vest, shot in the back of the head, with a $2 bill pinned to his underwear and absolutely no reasonable explanation. Police ruled it suicide. Monique and Amy, correctly, said: no, girl, no. If you take anything away from this episode, let it be this: when a three-year-old sees a crying soldier behind you, maybe believe the fucking child.