The Phantom Barber Of Pascagoula
Detroit Evening TimesAn illustration from the August 30, 1942 edition of the Detroit Evening Times.
Beginning in June 1942, a series of unsettling crimes struck fear into residents of the coastal Mississippi town of Pascagoula — and the mysterious perpetrator soon earned the name “The Phantom Barber of Pascagoula.”
According to newspaper reports from the time, the first incident occurred in a shared room in the convent of Our Lady of Victories, when two girls named Mary Evelyn Briggs and Edna Marie Hydel were awoken by a noise in the middle of the night.
They jolted up in bed just in time to see a man leaping from their bedroom window, but as they turned their lights on, they were pleasantly surprised to find they were both unharmed. Then, they saw what the nighttime intruder had done: The girls were each missing several locks of hair.
“I saw the figure of a kinda short, fat man,” Briggs would later say of her uninvited visitor, “bending over me with something shiny in his hand and he was fooling with my hair.”
Detroit Evening TimesMary Evelyn Briggs (left) and her sister, Laura.
Just a few days later, six-year-old Carol Peattie woke up to find some of her hair missing as well. The Phantom Barber soon found another victim, an adult this time, identified only as Mrs. R. E. Taylor, whose account led the police to conclude that the mysterious intruder had been using chloroform to keep his victims asleep while removing their locks.
“I had a vague feeling of something passing over my face,” Taylor recalled, “then woke up feeling ill.”
The weird historical event continued on June 13, when the Phantom Barber broke into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Terrell Heidelberg and beat each of them with an iron pipe as they slept. Although some initially believed this incident to be unrelated, a series of more than a dozen break-ins over the next week made it clear that this was a problem that needed to be dealt with.
Eventually, locals and police grew suspicious of a German-born chemist by the name of William Dolan, who was residing in Pascagoula at the time. Dolan, who had voiced sympathies for Germany in the midst of World War II, had reportedly been involved in a recent and rather public altercation with the Heidelbergs, giving him a possible motive. Human hair was also found outside his window, leading to his arrest.
While DNA testing had yet to be invented, the break-ins stopped upon Dolan’s arrest, seemingly confirming his identity as the Phantom Barber. He always maintained his innocence, however, and he was released early after passing a lie detector test. This suggests that he may have been framed — possibly by the Heidelbergs.
In either case, the Phantom Barber of Pascagoula ceased his nighttime chopping, and the townsfolk could finally sleep in peace.
