The only one I know
Here’s the only ghost story I’ve had any connection with, purely because I knew the people involved at the time. Please feel free to tl:dr as it’s a bit of a long one. Let’s go back to 1978….

Me and a friend of mine were fresh faced freshers going out into the big wide world at Manchester Polytechnic – me doing photography, her doing drama. The drama course at that time was based around the old Granada studios in Didsbury, a proper old theatre of a building. While she was there, ‘L’ started going out with a guy called ‘P’ – another drama student – and it’s him that this story revolves around.

Towards the end of the first year, L and P’s class were working towards some kind of end of term production which involved late night rehearsals at the theatre. One night, P was in the green room below the main stage when he heard what sounded like a siren going off. He walked out of the room, up the stairs and along the wings to look out onto the stage. Everyone else seemed to be carrying on as usual so P just presumed it was someone mucking about with a fire alarm or something. He turned to go back down to the green room and that’s when he saw him. A man in a pin stripe suit, the lower parts of his legs apparently sunk into the floor, looking up at P and pleading ‘Help me’.

They found P in the car park in a state of shock an hour or so later. When he told everyone what had happened, it struck a chord with one of the lecturers who recounted the story to his wife. A few days after the incident, the lecturer’s wife gave him a photo to show to P. When P saw it, not surprisingly shaken, he said ‘Yes, that’s him’.

It turned out that the lecturer’s wife used to work as a make up artist for Granada and specifically on a series that ran from the 50s to the early 70s called ‘Armchair Theatre’. In the early days, a lot of the AT broadcasts were live and came from the studios that were now the School of Theatre. During one production she worked on in the 60s, an actor had unfortunately suffered a fatal heart attack half way through the broadcast but, being live, a decision was made to carry on and improvise around the actor’s part. The actor was, as you’ve guessed, the one that P reckoned he had seen, dressed in costume and standing on the original wings floor before it had been built up.

Naturally, when I first heard the story from L and P, I was suitably sceptical. Then, a while ago in the just-pre-Internet days, I saw a documentary on 'Armchair Theatre' that included a section on this broadcast (google "Armchair Theatre” Underground). The play was about a potential nuclear attack with a group of people gathered together in an Underground station and was punctuated with the noise of air raid sirens throughout.

Not sure what to believe nowadays but it makes a good creepy story when I can find someone who I haven’t told it too before.

EDIT
Oooh. Just done a bit of googling and it seems the unfortunate actor died in make up.
( sponge monkey is knitting himself, Thu 20 Sep 2012, 11:11, Reply)