Pascagoula, Mississippi: The Phantom Barber's Midnight Crime Spree

In the summer of 1942, Pascagoula, Mississippi, was a quiet Gulf Coast town that the Ingalls Shipbuilding

yard had turned into a wartime boomtown almost overnight. That summer someone began cutting through window

screens at night, slipping into bedrooms, and snipping locks of hair from sleeping residents. Local

newspapers called him the Phantom Barber. He first struck on June 5, 1942, taking hair from two girls at

the Our Lady of Victories convent, eleven-year-old Mary Evelyn Briggs and twelve-year-old Edna Marie Hydel.

The attacks kept coming. Six-year-old Carol Peattie lost her blonde curls, and investigators found a sandy

footprint on the empty bed by her window. Mrs. R.E. Taylor woke to a sickening smell in the room, and

investigators suspected chloroform, while her family slept around her. Then the crimes turned violent, and

Terrell Heidelberg and his wife were beaten with an iron bar. Police arrested a 57-year-old chemist with

a German background named William A. Dolan, convicted him of attempted murder, and sentenced him to ten

years. He was never charged with a single hair-cutting incident. Dolan received a limited suspension of

his sentence after the polygraph, later made indefinite, with some accounts reporting a later pardon, and

the identity of the Phantom Barber was never established.

Timeline of Events

1938: Ingalls Shipbuilding is established along the Pascagoula River.

December 1941: Pearl Harbor brings a flood of federal wartime contracts to Ingalls.

Summer 1942: Pascagoula's population swells from roughly 4,900 to roughly 14,000.

June 5, 1942: The first attack. Mary Evelyn Briggs and Edna Marie Hydel have their hair cut at the convent.

June 8, 1942: The second attack. Carol Peattie's hair is taken and a sandy footprint is found on the empty

bed by the window.

June 13, 1942: Terrell Heidelberg and his wife are beaten with an iron bar.

Late June 1942: Mrs. R.E. Taylor wakes to a sickening smell in the room; investigators suspect chloroform.

August 14, 1942: Newspapers report William A. Dolan's arrest as the Phantom Barber.

1942: Dolan is convicted and sentenced to ten years.

About 1948: Governor Fielding Wright arranges a polygraph and Dolan is released.

About 1951: Wright's suspension is made indefinite; some accounts report Dolan was later pardoned by Governor

Hugh White.

Historical Significance

The Phantom Barber case sits where wartime paranoia, rapid social upheaval, and criminal justice failure

meet. Pascagoula's overnight transformation into a boomtown two or three times its size built the perfect

conditions for fear. Neighbors no longer recognized each other, night-shift workers left their families

alone in unfamiliar houses, and wartime anxiety was already running high. The panic reached ship production

itself, because workers refused to leave home for night shifts at Ingalls. Dolan's eventual pardon suggests

Mississippi came to acknowledge the conviction was wrong. No hair-cutting incident was ever reported again

after Dolan's imprisonment, and the case remains one of the strangest unsolved mysteries in American crime.

Sources

Mississippi Encyclopedia

Newspapers.com archives of 1942 Pascagoula and Jackson County coverage

National Park Service records on Gulf Coast wartime industry

Contemporary Ingalls Shipbuilding employment records

If you liked this: Episode 198, Carrollton, Mississippi. Another Mississippi story the official record

tried to file away quietly.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs,

and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at

mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 210 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

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