AS we near the season of things that go bump in the night, actor Jack Shepherd admits being in the forefront of ghostly experiences both scripted and unexplained as he brings Charles Dickens' The Signalman and a premiere of Robert Aickman's The Waiting Room to Darlington Civic Theatre this week.

"A lot of things have happened during performances that's true. When I played Southend – when The Signalman was running with Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad – on the first night the technical machinery broke down completely and I was laying in bed on stage waiting to be haunted.

"I saw the stage manager walk across and say to the audience that the computer is bust and we'd have to wait for a bit. I thought I might as well talk to the audience to pass the time. I said, 'Has anyone got any good ghost stories?', and this guy stood up and told us about George who haunts that theatre. He fell during the construction of the building and died later in hospital. The man said you can recognise him because you can sometimes experience his pipe smoke.

"Then, the show got back on the road, but every night something went wrong technically. Lights didn't work, fuses blew and then mid-week in the signal box scene an ordinary table-knife laying on a cupboard flew across the stage after we heard a cracking noise and shot past my nose and landed at Terence Hardiman's feet. Now Terry is a steady sort of bloke and I looked at him for reassurance and the blood had drained from his face and he looked terrified," says Shepherd.

The actor knew that both he and Hardiman – who has had to drop out of the current run because of ill-health – were non-believers when it came to be presence of spirits and were "rational, philosophical people".

"Things continued to go wrong and Terry spoke to his wife, who is more psychically inclined, and she said, 'You've just got to talk to him and tell George to stop it because we've had enough of this'. After a matinee, later in the week, we were crossing the stage and Terry stopped and said in that voice he had in The Demon Headmaster, 'Look George, we've had enough. Just stop this'. I was surprised because it was a completely irrational speech from someone I knew was totally rational. But it did stop and, for the next three performances, we had no problems whatsoever," says Shepherd.

After this experience the actor says he now feels that "something is going on, but what it is I haven't the faintest idea. There are all kind of alternative explanations for things".

As a direct result of the "flying knife" and George the ghost incident, Shepherd is presenting a BBC Radio 4 programme about Ghosts in Theatres on Wednesday, October 28.

"I've got a pile of stories to tell and there are no satisfactory explanations. That's what makes it an interesting programme," says the actor, who inspired the ghost tales after his son told a radio producer about Southend and it led to a commission. Sadly, none of Darlington Civic's ghostly sightings will feature.

I can't help wondering what possessed Shepherd to take on a role in The Signalman where he's a man haunted by a spectre which seems to foretell death on the track nearby. In The Waiting Room the spooky story involves a man forced to spend a freezing cold night at a station where he might not be alone...

"I'm intrigued by these stories and when you get older it's harder to become employed to be honest. At 50 you can play 40 or 60 or your own age. As you get older you're stuck with the role of grandfathers. There's not much else. I've just played a general in a programme about the Easter Rising, but I was pleased to get this role.

"At my age you're looking at your own demise a little more seriously than you were ten years before," jokes the actor, who is now in his mid-70s.

"Inside the play is very different from being outside of it because you're obsessed with the technicalities of acting, the lighting and with getting the story told right."

Shepherd has been keen on the railways from boyhood and grew up in Leeds area where the father of his best friend was a steam engineer. As a result, the young Shepherd visited Leeds Central Station regularly and was shown the shunting yards, the signal box and grew up with the magic of steam.

"He was an absolutely wild Welshman from Bangor and slightly crazy, slightly mad, but a brilliant engineer and had immense enthusiasm for life and that didn't help me to create a taciturn guy who runs a signal box. In the story he's just the Signalman and it seems to me that he was born from Dickens own guilt. Dickens didn't testify in a rail crash he was involved in for fear of his infidelities being splashed in the tabloid press of the time. The foreman was blamed for everything, but I think Dickens could have helped him by going to court and I think he felt very guilty about that," says Shepherd about a crash at Staplehurst, Kent on June 9, 1865, involving the boat train.

Dickens had been returning from France with his Newcastle mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother when the train derailed after running into engineering works. Ten people died and 49 were injured. Dickens helped the injured and dying before climbing back into his carriage to rescue the manuscript of his novel Our Mutual Friend. Bizarrely, Dickens died five years later to the day.

Richard Walsh, best-known for TV series London's Burning, plays opposite Shepherd in The Signalman with the actor, who is still seen on TV as 1990s Detective Superintendent Charles Wycliffe, taking the lead role of stranded passenger George Pendlebury in The Waiting Room.

"Since Z Cars started it, there's always been police series on TV, some of them wonderful and some of them terrible. As I had a lot of children at the time there was a good financial reason for doing Wycliffe. The repeats now are like having a shadow following you around. The me of 20 years ago is still fresh in everyone's minds. It's like walking down a street on a sunny day and turning round and there's this thing following behind."

Of course, as Halloween approaches, the rest of us can only wish to be haunted by such greatness.

* The Signalman/The Waiting Room runs at Darlington Civic Theatre until Saturday. Box Office: 01325-486555 or darlingtoncivic.co.uk