The Phantom Barber of Pascagoula

There were some creepy occurrences that took place in Pascagoula three years into World War Two in the summer of 1942. It was a bit of a lurker of the nights. But thankfully, there were no throats cut. There were no people smothered with pillows where they slept, but they were some non-consensual haircuts afoot.

What we know surrounding this war effort is that the US was absolutely in a nasty state socially ; Pearl Harbor obviously freaked everybody out and was a come to Jesus moment in terms of we’re not as invincible as we thought against outside enemies. And so, young strapping men went off to fight the Germans and the Japanese overseas. And of course, women were taking over all these factory jobs that were once held down by men. And these small towns suddenly became responsible for generating tons of stuff needed for the war effort.

Pascagoula is one of the many, historically smaller towns that had been transformed by the war. They originally had a population of about 5000, if you want to ballpark it, and in a very short amount of time, it tripled to 15,000. A larger population means a couple of things, right? First, it can be a huge boost for the local businesses. But it also means, to put it loosely, more people more problems. The police force is overwhelmed trying to keep all these newcomers in line, there’s an uptick in drunken brawls, break-ins, all the petty street crime. But by far, the Phantom barber was the midis that took people most by surprise, and that most people came to worry about on a nightly basis. I do want to point out that sometimes he was able to get a full head of hair off people.

I think, I mean, obviously, this is more innocuous than a serial killer, who is building some kind of shrine out of the severed limbs of his victims. Makes you wonder what the Phantom Barber was doing with this pilfered hair.

At this time, resources were at a premium. Due to economic concerns or due to security concerns, it wasn’t uncommon for the army to institute restrictions on things like food, it could be rationed at times, rubbers, steel; those industries were affected. And then blackout regulations were considered. In this case, they were considered a security matter or a patriotic duty, because the idea was that if you turned off lights at night, then it would be more difficult for enemy forces to figure out where they should bomb. okay

They would have had to use maybe cardboard, or even paint the windows, you know, to have them be opaque so the light wouldn’t come in. But I think rather than do that, some people maybe just turn the lights out a little earlier than normal. Less hassle. Right?

These crimes began in 1942. On Friday, June 5, 1942, two women living at a conference called Our Lady of Victories, one Mary Evelyn Briggs, and one Edna Marie Hydel, were shocked when they saw a guy climbing out of their bedroom window.

They saw him leaving. They were unharmed, but each of them was missing a lock of hair. The only victim of the hair shear who will come to see the barber was Mary Evelyn Briggs at Our Lady of Victories convent.

I saw a figure of a kind of short fat man. She said, bending over me with something shiny in his hand, and he was fooling with my hair. When he saw me open my eyes. I yelled, and he jumped out the window.

So he had to be in decent shape. He’s jumping through windows or whatnot. Everybody in the nation is pretty paranoid, things are tense. There’s a lot of propaganda asking you to consider whether or not your neighbor is indeed a spy. So this very weird attack didn’t do much to make people feel safer in their homes. And by the time the next Monday rolls around, the town is rife with stories and rumors and the game of telephone is already beginning with people adding or embellishing details.

It’s interesting because hair is ultimately a waste product. There’s a really great article in The New Statesman that kind of breaks the very unusual and fraught human hair trade town. Apparently, it has quite a rich political backstory. But there are other historical uses for human hair, for example, it can be used to strengthen kind of mud and dung wall, you know, situations in like Adobe huts, or in Indian villages where they’re using this as like kind of like a conduit to bind things together. It can be used in Irish vegetable gardens. Hair is sometimes mixed with other substances to repel snails. And it can be woven into mats. And I always forget about this one, but it can be used to soak up oil spills. It can also be wound into ropes that are generally put around rickshaws to ward off bad luck.

The human hair trade is pretty old. This was not a fun time for the people involved in the trade in 1840. Thomas Trollope watched hair dealers rounding up peasant girls and sharing them like sheep. And if you were in prisons, workhouses, or hospitals in England in the 1800s, you might find your head shaved, and those institutions might sell your hair for an extra bit of income. And it’s weird because this was such a problem, as The New Statesman reports, during some waves of US immigration, immigrants who consider themselves hair dealers were actually barred from Ellis Island until they were able to get in, and soon there was a booming hair industry in the Big Apple in New York City.

There’s ancient precedents to this, we can rightly assume that many people from earlier cultures felt roughly the same. Like there’s one of the most infamous stories of non-consensual haircuts which comes from the story of Samson, right? He has his hair cut, and thereby his strength removed after getting suckered in by a con artist, but there are newer versions of these crimes. Because the industry is so lucrative, the underground element gets involved. And way before the Phantom Barber of Pascagoula, there were already hair criminals that were robbing particularly women of their hair. This was a well known crime in 1863.

So, people are literally running up behind these women, and trying to get as much hair as they can as quickly as possible. But there’s something else at play here. You see, there are people stealing hair for a financial motive but then there are also people who have, frankly, a fetish as their primary motivator. And when they cut off someone’s hair, presumably a woman’s hair, they’re not planning to sell it, they covet it, they take it home, they take they hide it, they they touch and dress and smell at it. It’s weird.

That definitely feels a little bit more like what this Phantom Barbara was up to, especially with the whole home invasion aspect of it. And there’s potential for escalation here. A lot of times, you know, maybe someone who has the potential to be rapist or a murderer will start off kind of like edging at the ultimate crime, right? Like you start off by breaking in and cutting a lock of hair, but then that stops doing it for you. Then you have to take it to the next level.

I do want to point out another huge piece of mythology and folklore here, which is that hair along with things like teeth, or nail clippings, toe and fingernail clippings are often considered to have religious or even magical significance. It’s a story like if you get your hair cut in some parts of the world today, the common practice is to burn it so that a miscreant magicians will not gather it for some nefarious use.

The barber clearly is pretty excited. This is their first reported attack, it is quite possible that they’re just one of the many people who moved to Pascagoula recently, and they have been doing other stuff escalating up to this in some other towns somewhere else. They appeared to love the press or couldn’t control themselves, because just a few days later on Monday, June 8, 1942 at the home of a PD family, the barber cuts a slit in a window screen, crawls inside his victim’s room; a six year old child sleeping next to her twin brother. He only wanted the young lady’s hair though. he seems to be getting bolder, doesn’t he?

It’s only the next Friday night June 13 when he invades the home of the Heidelberg family. And just like his MO with previous attacks, he cuts the windows screen, he enters through the window but instead of just cutting hair and then sneaking away, he attacked the couple with an iron bar. He actually knocked out some of Mrs. Heidelberg’s front teeth and knocked her husband unconscious. So that’s a concussion at the very least. And it happens so quickly that neither of the Heidelberg’s could really describe their attack.

Fortunately, the Heidelberg’s have survived. But everyone is panicking. Now, even the people who had perhaps more of a level head during the previous two attacks. Men decreed that they wouldn’t work night shifts at the ship factories anymore because they needed to stay home and protect their family or at least their family’s hair. And this had a direct impact on production for the war efforts. The police are at a loss. What the heck is going on? They offer a $300 reward for information and that would be the equivalent of about $1,526.76 today, which to me seems a little light for a home invader who’s knocking out teeth.

Well, they may have had the threat of federal pressure, but they weren’t getting federal funding for that. We’re already in a very vulnerable position. Women outright refuse to go out at night, people started applying for firearm permits. They were getting ready. They sensed the pattern and they predicted there would be another attack. As Mental Floss points out in this case, their predictions were correct. The final attack that we know of occurs on a Sunday night. Mrs. R. E. Taylor has her hair non-consensually cut. She said she had been woken by something with a sickening smell passing over her nose.

A lot of people have this misunderstanding of chloroform from the world of fiction. You can’t really just pop it over someone’s mouth, and then take it away and have them insensate for a long time. You have to keep it on. Whenever you see it done in films where people come and sneak up behind and they’re just out like a light, you know, indefinitely.

There’s a little human detail we have to add for Miss R. E. Taylor. She is further upset by this attack because she is just gotten a perm. And now she’s lost two inches of it.

Pressure is mounting for local law enforcement to find somebody to pin this on because you know, you can’t have somebody just willy nilly running around this town. When everyone’s under so much pressure and stress because of the boys being off at war. I don’t know if i’ve mentioned specifically but the stock and trade in Pascagoula was building warships. So I mean, that’s kind of a lot of work. The cops are very much looking to pin this on somebody and they get their wish in the form of a William Dolan, a 57-year-old chemist. He had beef with Mr. Heidelberg over a legal issue. So, they believed that he had attacked the couple out of revenge.

German-educated Kevin Dolan had been in jail for three weeks and is charged with the attempted murder of the Heidelberg. The police knew that his problems with the local magistrate due to his earlier arrest a few months back for trespassing didn’t directly tie him to the invasions but when they went to his house to search his house, they found a huge bundle of human hair.

This gentleman was of German descent. So of course, the press jumped right on that and started calling him a Nazi, who was known to have German sympathies, you know, and this was just an absolutely perfect excuse to railroad this gentleman.

He insisted he was innocent but was immediately found guilty of attempted murder and given 10 years in prison. He never gets charged with any crimes related to hair snatching. But he has been found guilty in the court of public opinion. As some of the paranoia dies out. Six years later, then Mississippi governor Fielding Wright, looked over the case and decided to have Dolan take a lie detector test, because those are super helpful, right? People still mistook lie detectors for science at this time. Dolan passed his polygraph test. He was given a limited suspended sentence, he was eventually set free. In 1951 he became a free man, despite, you know, probably not being welcomed in Pascagoula for the rest of his life. You might not be surprised to learn that modern historians wonder whether Dolan was guilty of any crime at all, because there’s some of the stuff you just mentioned in the Zeitgeist at the time.

It’s a good question. At this point. You know, maybe the mob just wanted to see someone go down and they all knew that Dolan had ties to Germany, a lot of townsfolk considered him a traitor. It also would have been really easy to plant that hairball during Dolan’s arrest, you could also tamper with the evidence that got sent to the FBI. But it will probably never be clear whether Dolan was the genuine Phantom Barber of Pascagoula, or whether he was a scape goat who was sort of sacrifice on the altar of public safety right or the altar of public comfort.

Sources:

1. https://blog.newspapers.com/the-phantom-barber-of-pascagoula

2.https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55316/strange-states-mississippis- phantom-barber-pascagoula

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascagoula,_Mississippi

4. https://obscurban-legend.fandom.com/wiki/Phantom_Barber

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