The Phantom Barber of Pascagoula

For a brief period in 1942, the town of Pascagoula, Mississippi was terrorized by a strange criminal -- he would sneak into people's houses as they slept and cut off locks of their hair. In today's episode, Ben and Noel explore this bizarre series of events (which may remain unsolved in the modern day).

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome

(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you
so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super
producer Casey Pegram and a very special shout out to
our super producer Max Williams. I've ben Noel. Max is
with us today. He's with us corporeally, or at least

(00:48):
in in in zoom form, which is basically it's good.
That's about the best we can hope for these days.
Digital poorly will work. We'll work on that whatever whatever
it takes. Max, would you like to say a few
words to mark the occasion? Hey, everyone, I guess these
are first few words. Yeah, super excited to be here. Um,
super fun, I mean first time here, so I don't
know that's fun all I got to set. First time lurker,

(01:10):
no long time lurker, first time talker. Yes, welcome Max.
Thank you for joining us today. No, Max has been
doing a time of work with us behind the scenes.
And you know how we are. We're big fans of
of grabbing our friends and colleagues for the show, and
sometimes against their will, but they usually warm up too

(01:32):
the idea eventually. Yes, yeah, yeah, concentus key. So today
Max Noel and I are exploring uh strange tale from Pascagoula, Mississippi.
No Nol have you spent much time in Mississippi? I
spent basically effectively zero time in Mississippi. I imagine that
I have passed through it. Nothing really specifically comes to

(01:56):
minds as far as like a notable occurrence in my
life taking place in Mississippi. But I do love the
name Pascagoula. It sounds like kind of spooky. I think
it's because of the ghoul part. Maybe it makes me
think that it's like some sort of creepy town where
you know, ghoules live. But I don't think that's the
case at all. But there were some creepy occurrences that

(02:16):
took place in Pascagoula three years into World War Two,
in the summer of nineteen forty two. It was something
of a ghoul of a bit of a creeper, a
lurker of the night um. But thankfully there were no
throats cut, there were no people smothered with pillows where
they slept, but they there were some non consensual haircuts afoot. Yeah, Yeah,

(02:38):
that's that's where this already starts out in a pretty
unique way. So imagine you're in law and order Pascagoula.
Do you get to the get to the scene of
the crime where someone has been I shouldn't laugh, Where
someone has been in a way assaulted but not sexually,

(03:01):
and they haven't been physically harmed in terms of their limbs,
but their egos may have taken a tremendous blow because
their hair was gone, and I don't think they were
shaped there. Their entire heads weren't shaved, but they were
kind of like, uh, they were slapdash locks cut off, right. Yeah,

(03:22):
I mean we'll get we'll get more into the aesthetics
of it as we go along. But like I said,
I think I'm gonna go with the phrase, like you
do for ambulance has been non consensual ubers, these are
non consensual haircuts. In nineteen forty two, this is all
kind of, you know, surrounding this war effort. The US
was absolutely in a nasty, nasty state socially society. Pearl Harbor,

(03:46):
you know, obviously freed everybody out and was a real
kind of like come to Jesus moment in terms of like, okay,
maybe we're not as invincible as we thought against outside enemies. Um.
And so all of these young, strapping men went off
to fight that Jarman's in the Japanese overseas. Uh. And
of course, you know, as we know, like with um
Rosie the Riveter, in that whole campaign, women were taking

(04:09):
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. Yeah, exactly.
Pascagoulu is one of the many historically smaller towns that
have been transformed by the war. So they originally had

(04:30):
a population of about five thousand if you want a
ballpark it and in a very short amount of time
that ballooned it trebled to fifteen thousand. And a larger
population means a couple of things. Right first, it can
be a huge boost for the local businesses, but it
also means, you know it, to put it loosely, more people,

(04:53):
more problems. The police force is overwhelmed trying to keep
all these newcomer is in line. There's an uptick in
drunken brawls, break ins, all the petty street crime, but
by far the phantom barber was the menace that took
people most by surprise and that most people came to

(05:16):
worry about on a nightly basis. I do want to
point out that sometimes just a quick amendment here, 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 was building some kind
of maccab shrine out of the severed limbs of his victim.
Which gotta wonder what the phantom barber was doing with
this Pilford hair. It's interesting though, he had kind of

(05:40):
a leg up because of the kind of army occupation
of this town, because the Army had something called blackout
regulations that made it easier for him to to get
his dirty deed done. He absolutely at this time resources
were out of premium, and it wasn't uncommon for either
do tech aconomic concerns or due to security concerns. It

(06:03):
wasn't uncommon for the army to institute restrictions on things.
You know, food could be rationed at times, rubber 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've

(06:26):
turned off lights electric lights at night, then it would
be more difficult for enemy forces to figure out where
they should bomb. Which makes sense. People could have lights
on at their houses, right, they just had to have
blackout curtains exactly. Um, but I think maybe, yeah, I
don't know. Blackout cooms to me seemed like a little

(06:46):
bit more of a maybe a modern innovation, But that's
not necessarily true. 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 light out a little earlier than normal. Yeah,
it seems less hassle, right, it doesn't. Remember that episode
we did about the very innovative Frenchman who built the

(07:09):
tiny scale model of of Paris to try to throw
off the bombers. Similarly, right, because if they killed the
lights in the actual city and they built this kind
of you know, model where from the sky would look
much like you were seeing the Paris skyline, you would
only be able to achieve that if actual Paris was
totally blacked out. So it's all tracks, and let's let's

(07:32):
look at how these crimes began. As you said, no,
this begins in nineteen forty two, on Friday June five,
two women living at a convent called Our Lady of Victories,
one Mary Evelyn Briggs and one Edna Marie Hidel. They
were shocked when they saw a guy climbing out of

(07:55):
their bedroom window, and they saw him as he was
leaving h They were unharmed, but each of them was
missing a lock of hair, and max if we could
get a little like um, something kind of unsolved mystery vibe,

(08:17):
but not close enough to that to get us sued
while we give you a dramatic reading from the Greenville
News and only want to do the honors on this one. Oh,
by all means been The only victim of the hair
shere who woke in time to see the barber was
Mary Evelyn Bridges at Our Lady of Victories convent. I

(08:37):
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 hand. When he saw
me open my eyes, he said, I yelled. He jumped
out the window, so he had to be an at
least kind of decent shape. He's jumping through windows and whatnot.

(08:58):
Look at this time, so w aller to the situation
with the mad gas or everybody in town, everybody in
the nation is pretty paranoid. Things are tense. Uh, 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

(09:20):
in their homes. And by the time the next Monday
rolls around, the town is rife with stories and rumors.
In the game of telephone is already beginning. People are embellishing,
adding details, and this we can only imagine may have
been an incentive of sort to the Frowler. And this

(09:43):
is where we go. You know what, We're not gonna
maybe we call this Law and Order Pascagoula, but maybe
it's the episode that leads us to the spinoff Law
and order hair crime. Exactly. There's a special unit what
what what is it? Uh? In the criminal justice system,
some crimes are of uh what is it? Hairsuit nature?
Maybe a hairy person? Yeah, exactly, Um, what's that word here? Hairsuit?

(10:07):
Doesn't that refer to someone that's Harry. Yeah, I gotta
got it. These are their stories. But anyway, Yeah, it's like,
to me, though, this is scary because I look at
cutting a lock of hair as sort of a pervy, creepy,
fetishy thing. Um that that is how I see it,
unless he again, he has some like, you know, grand
scheme of building the ultimate wig Frankenstein together. That's still

(10:30):
creepy in pervy in and of itself. But like, we
know that people have like hair fetishes. But it's interesting
because hair, you know, is ultimately a waste product. Um.
There's a really great article in the New statesman um
that kind of breaks the very unusual and fraught human
hair trade down. Apparently it has quite a rich political backstory,

(10:54):
but it's true. I mean, you know, like wigs made
of human hair are the more sought after ones and
more expend so my kid is really into wigs. For example,
the synthetic ones are apparently a lot more difficult to style.
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

(11:18):
in Indian villages where they're using. This is like kind
of like a conduit to bind things together. It can
be used in in Irish vegetable gardens. Um hair is
sometimes mixed with other substances to repel snails um and
it can be woven into mats. And I always forget
about this Oneman, but it can be used to soak
up oil spills. Yeah, yeah, it can. It can also

(11:41):
be wound into ropes that can be well generally they're
put around rickshaws to word off bad luck. But you're right.
The hair trade, the human hair trade and specific is
pretty old. It was also not always super happy fun
time for the people of volved in the trade. In
eighteen forty, Thomas Trollope with an E watched hair dealers

(12:07):
rounding up peasant girls and sharing them like sheep. And
if you were in prisons, workhouses or hospitals in England
in the eighteen hundreds, 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

(12:28):
a problem, as The New Statesman reports that during some
waves of US immigration, immigrants who consider themselves hair dealers
were actually barred from Ellis Islands. Still they were able
to get in and soon there was a booming hair
industry in the Big Apple in New York City itself.

(12:49):
That's right, I just want to go back to like
the you know, the shaving of someone's head, especially a
woman when they're incarcerated, for example. It's like a dehumanizing
thing to do, right, It's like saying like you are
no longer you no longer have an identity because so
many people tie their sense of self to the way
they look, and so much of the way some people
look is tied to the way they wear their hair.

(13:11):
So it really it's kind of a twofold thing, right, yeah, yeah,
And you know, there's ancient precedence to this. We can
rightly assume that many people from earlier cultures felt roughly
the same, like there's the One of the most infamous
stories of non consensual haircuts comes from the story of

(13:31):
Sampson right where he has where he has his hair
and then and there by his strength removed because he
gets he gets 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 before,

(13:52):
way before the phantom Barber of Pascagoula, there were already
hair criminals and they were robbing, particularly women, of their hair.
This was like a well known crime. It was in
eighteen sixty three The Hairdressers Journal wrote a piece about
this trend, both the warn people and to sell more

(14:15):
editions of the Hairdresser's Journal, Max kicking that music again perfect.
Even in the present day, it has happened over and
over again that a good crop of hair has been
laid and wait for and shorn from the trembling victim
who has only been too glad to get free with
but the loss of her hair. So they're saying, hey,

(14:37):
at least they didn't die. Waca waca waka, no doubt.
The Times of London actually reported on this uh in
April of eighteen nine, with the headline hair thieves not
alarmist at all. An American paper states that, in consequence
of the demand for hair of peculiar colors and shades,
a new brand of cleptic industry because I love that

(14:58):
cleptic industry has sprung up in New Walk. The trusses
dangling behind the head are easy prey, so that's correct.
People are literally running up behind these women and then
trying to get as much hair as they can as
quickly as possible. This is, to say the least, and
a troubling, if not traumatic experience. And you'll see other

(15:19):
reports from different magazines and papers of the day in
Europe and in the US. But there's something else at
play here, you see, there's not there. There are people
stealing hair for a financial motive, but then there are
also people who have frankly a fetish as their primary motivator.

(15:41):
And when they cut off someone's hair, overwhelmingly a woman's hair,
they're not planning to sell it. They covet it, they
take it home, they take they hide it, they touch
and cress and smell at it. It's it's weird. It's
like a control over someone. I mentioned that at the
top of the show. That definitely feels a little bit
more like what this phantom barber was up to, especially

(16:04):
with the whole home invasion aspect of it. Uh. And
the thing that I was getting out that I didn't
quite get to um is it feels like 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

(16:26):
doing it for you, and then you have to, like,
you know, take it to the next level. And that's
the kind of thing you see in those Law and
Order episodes all the time, and it would certainly be
addressed in Law and Order hair crimes. But these uh,
hair fetishists. There's a couple of names for them that
seem maybe a little dated or like they were coined
back in these days, but I've never heard of these before,
and they're fascinating. One of them is called plate cutter.

(16:48):
Oh that's p L a I T. Correct or hair despoilers,
which kind of makes me think that they're doing something
to the hair afterwards when they get at home. Yeah, yeah,
hopefully they're just watching it. But this is this is
a family show. There's there's also I do want to
step back and point out another huge piece of mythology

(17:14):
and folklore here, which is that hair, along with things
like teeth or nail clippings. Toe and fingernail clippings are
are often considered to have religious or even magical significance.
It's a true story. Like if you get your hair
cut in some parts of the world today and the
common practices to burn it so that a miscreant magician

(17:37):
will not gather it for some nefarious use. Well, and
let's not forget I mean the modern you know, version
of magic in so many ways as science and what
are you looking for if you're trying to, like, you know,
pin a crime on somebody and you want to match
their DNA or something that seems the crime. There's that
old trick where you know, you you pluck a piece
of their hair while they're sleeping or something like that,

(17:57):
or you go in you know, their bathroom them and
like look for you know, lip marks on a glass
or something like that, or you steal a toothbrush. But
hair absolutely contains all of that. And they also say
that hair samples is one of the only ways you
can tell if someone has done certain classes of drug before,
Like there is a you know, like a urine samples
is one level, but it won't reveal everything. Hair apparently,

(18:20):
sort of like the rungs of a tree or the
rings in the inside of a tree, has much more
of a history to it as to like what someone
has consumed, and you can see if someone has done
classes of psychedelic drugs that won't show up in other tests. Yeah, yeah,
you know, I'm glad you brought that up, because for
anyone wondering, I believe the ballpark is about seven years.

(18:42):
Your hair is about a seven year record of your
encounters with certain substances. There are I remember hearing their
shampoos that can do something, but I would be very
if you're in a situation where that matters, I would
read very carefully about their efficacy. And it's a much
more expensive test. So you know, if your employer is

(19:04):
going for that one, they mean business, you know, in
terms of like they're not gonna let anything slide. Um.
Thankfully we work in podcasting and so we didn't have
to worry about that kind of stuff. No comments, but
let's talk about let's talk about this next attack. So
he said, the barber clearly is pretty excited. This is
their first reported attack. It is quite possible that they're

(19:27):
just one of the many people who moved to Pascagoula recently,
and that they have been doing other stuff escalating up
to this. Uh in some other town somewhere else. But
they appeared to love the press, or they couldn't control themselves,
because just a few days later, Monday June, at the
home of the p D family, the barber cuts a

(19:49):
slit in the windows screen. He crawls inside his victim,
a six year old child, Carold p D, sleeping next
to her twin brother. He only one of the young
lady's hair though. Yeah, super creepy, remember you know how, Gabe,
sometimes when we do these kind of like stories of

(20:10):
these weird lone wolf creepers, oftentimes there's like a series
of toys from the I think early nineties called Monster
in My Pocket, And there definitely was one of the
Jersey Devil, and there was definitely one of the Mad Gasser.
Don't know if the Phantom barber is quite ghoulish enough
to make that collection, but I would be interested to
see if that. He usually includes that as a little

(20:32):
addendum at the end. And by the way, there was
a Monster in My Pocket edition of of this figure. No,
it's true, and he seems to be getting more bold,
doesn't he. This time he was a little sloppy and
he left a clue behind for the hair squad. Um
the hair crime unit to take a look at. It
was a footprint near the window. And back then, like

(20:53):
you know, they didn't have DNA test, but a footprint
you could match it. You you literally have to like
do your detective work and go around to various shoe
stores and like you know, take the print and like
like have you seen this shoe? You know, I love that.
I love the analog nature of this early kind of
detective work. You know. Yeah, it's it's a noir Cinderella,

(21:15):
but we're looking for a creep rather than apprentice. The
point about escalation is key often times, unfortunately, as you
know if you're a fan of true crime, these sorts
of individuals can escalate both their sexual and their physical
violence to the point where murder can come into play.

(21:36):
And it looks like our barber is getting more and
more violent very quickly. It's only the next Friday night,
June when he invades the home of the Heidelberg family

(21:57):
and just like his emo 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 and he actually knocked
out some of Mrs Heidelberg's front teeth knocked her husband unconscious.
So that's a concussion at the very least. And it

(22:19):
happened so quickly that neither of the Heidelberg's could really
describe their attack or even you know, even to the
degree that Mary did earlier. They couldn't say, this is
a short, rotund man. They said, I don't know what happened,
you know, but this guy knocked my teeth out. And
so the police, they're already, remember, overwhelmed by a huge

(22:40):
population growth of like ten thousand strangers. But they find
six men, they deputize them. They bring him bloodhounds and
they say, they say, let's get on the case. Done indeed,
Um do do do dode do do do do do
do do do do do? Sorry, I actually watched it
SVU last night, so that theme is impetded deep, deep,

(23:00):
deep within my psyche right now. But yeah, you bring
in the bloodhounds. You know, the pitchforks are next, you know, torches.
I mean they are after this guy literally, you know,
out for blood, which is what the bloodhounds are are
searching for. Um, everybody knows that. But the dogs were
able to pick up a scent, presumably from a pair
of blood stained gloves. Um. This totally supports my thesis

(23:21):
on like the outskirts of town, the edge of the
woods kinda. But that's where they lost the trail, and
the police believed that the criminal behind these attacks had
stored a bicycle somewhere in the woods to make his
daring escape on a bike. That doesn't sound very exciting
to me, but I mean, you know, it's it's functional.
So fortunately the Heidelberg's have survived. But everyone is panicking now,

(23:46):
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 families hair. And this had a direct
impact on production for the war efforts. Now there's gonna

(24:06):
be some federal pressure coming in. The police are at
a loss what the heck is going on. They offer
a three hundred dollar reward for information. Oh, Ben, I'm
already there. Can I do it this time? Yeah? Nol?
How about you do the honors with a little bit
of inflation calculation there. That would be the equivalent of

(24:31):
about one thousand, five hundred six dollars and seventy six
cents and today money, which to me seems that seems
a little light, doesn't it for for a home and
a home invader who's knocking out teeth and slicing locks. Well,
they may have had the threat of federal pressure, but
they weren't getting federal funding for this, and we're already

(24:53):
in a very vulnerable position. Women outright refused 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.

(25:16):
Taylor has her hair non consensually cut. She said she
had been woken by something with a sickening smell passing
over her nose. So that he's a smelly boy too.
It makes sense, you know, he's he's obviously a some
sort of societal outcast, you know, who has no way

(25:39):
of interacting with human beings. I mean, you gotta wonder, though,
was he known. He seems like he would not do well,
just socially, and he would he would be seen as
kind of a miscreant or like someone who couldn't really
just get it get on day to day with with
normal people. That's just my theory though. So I'm wondering
if he lived out in the woods or something and
was sleeping rough, like say Ben, like if that's why,

(26:01):
maybe that's why he smelled bad and everybody noticed. Like I. So,
the way that a lot of Law and Order episodes
get written is there what a clearly telegraph who the
criminal is. Right, first rule is it's almost always going
to be the famous guest star, and that's always a
lot of fun. But in this I picture, like I

(26:23):
I picture maybe police just not putting together the puzzle.
Like there's a guy who comes into town once a
week or so for every few days to pick up
some really specific groceries, and the only person he talks
to is the cashier, and all he wants to talk
to about is people's hair. So he's like, hey, did
you see, uh, look at that lady going through that

(26:45):
the blonde hair. What do you think about that? They're like, yes, sir,
it's Sunday. People get dressed up and He's like, Yeah,
what do you how long you think it takes them
to do their hair like that? What do you think
about that? So so, I like it seems the theory
that someone might be sleeping rough seems to have some sand.

(27:06):
I would argue it sounds like they weren't showering, or
maybe they were trying to apply some sort of chemical.
This is maybe maybe that's the smell of something like
a chloroform rag or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, but
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

(27:28):
them in sensate for a long time. You have to
keep it on understanding. Yeah. Yeah, it always seems like
a magic bullet whenever you see it done in these
these films, are people sneak up behind them, They're just
out like a light, you know, indefinitely, and then they
wake up in some sort of you know, hair covered layer.
That's what I'm picturing, just locks of hair all over
the wall, woven into like weird garlands or something. I

(27:51):
really do think this feels like an episode of Law
and Order. Ben, Are you familiar with the term. Obviously
there's who done it, but then there's how catch them?
Where they show you who it is at the big inning,
and then you like just kind of have to see
how the detectives are the you know, crack team of
investigators catch to the individual. I've never heard that that's interesting.
There's a sample. There's a show called luther Um starring

(28:13):
in dress elba Um, where at the very beginning of
every episode you see it's like a cold open where
you see a crime taking place and you very clearly
see who the who the killer is, and then you
see them in you know, their daily lives and oftentimes
they cross paths with the investigators or there's someone who
they're actively looking into. Colombo is a how catch them?
You always see who the killer is or who the

(28:34):
criminal is at the very beginning, and you know who
it is throughout the whole show. The twist isn't in
who they are. The twist is and how they're caught.
I see. Okay, Yeah, it's interesting, and there's a little
human detail we have to add. For miss r E. Taylor.
For anyone who's ever had a perm you understand that

(28:55):
this is something this can be kind of a big deal.
It makes you feel nice when you have your hair dined.
She is further upset by this attack because she has
just gotten a perm and now she's lost two inches
of it. She woke up feeling ill. One way that
newspapers of the time reported the cases, they referred to

(29:16):
this criminal as a tonsorial artist. Tonsorial is a fancy
dressed up word for barber or the work of a barber.
I did not know that. I had no idea. That's great. Um,
So you know, pressure is mounting, uh to low for
local law enforcement to find somebody to pin this on,

(29:37):
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 the boys being off at war and
all of these ships they gotta build, they gotta build it.
I don't know if we've mentioned specifically, but they're Stock
and Trade here in Pascagoula was building warships, So I
mean that's kind of a big deal, and that's a
lot of work. So this isn't cool. This is not

(30:00):
doing much good for anybody's mental health. So the cops
are very much looking to pin this on somebody, and
they get their wish in the form of a William Dolan,
a fifty seven year old chemists, sounds exactly like, uh,
everything we've been saying in terms of, like, you know,
the the profile, right, he's a fifty seven year old chemist,

(30:20):
and he had had beef with Mr Heidelberg's father, who
was a local magistrate, and that was over a legal issue.
So they believed that he maybe had attacked the couple
out of revenge. But see that detail here doesn't track
to me ben these previous attacks. Clearly Again, we're we're
not looking for someone who's out for revenge. We're looking

(30:41):
for someone who's out to kind of get some sort
of sick thrill or pleasure out of this crime, not
someone who's trying to you know, make a statement. Yeah,
this is so they're good. Everybody's strapping. They're gonna be
some twist and turns here. So from the Daily Times,
we can get a breaking news max perfect from the

(31:01):
Daily Times. Police GEF A. W as Well played today
that the fat of Barbara woke into at least ten
homes that cut the hair of the sleepy documents. Is
William ay Dolan, fifty seven German educated chemists Dolan, as
an announced, has been in jail for three weeks and
his charge with the attempted murder of the Heidelberg's. His
motivation as l charge was to impair the morale of
wall workers, which sounds like politicizing, Yeah, but here's the thing.

(31:27):
Here's the thing, because it does like we're making a
very easy understandable case for why the police would want
to escapegoat which happens, which does happen. But they 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

(31:49):
his house to search his house, dude, they found a
huge bundle of human hair behind his whole world. Do
you think they like planted it on him, dude? I
mean that really that's a little on the nose there.
I don't know, that is fascinating. Chap Man just have
his hairball. I mean, come on, you know, this is America.

(32:11):
But that whole idea of this is America really played
into it, and the whole wartime kind of mindset, because
like we said, this gentleman was of German descent, so
of course, the press jumped right on that and started
calling him a Nazi saboteur who was known to have
German sympathies, you know, and and this was just absolutely

(32:32):
perfect excuse to railroad this gentleman, exactly. Yes, so he
insisted he was innocent, but yeah, he's immediately found guilty
of attempted murder, ten years in prison. He never gets
charged with any crimes related to the hair snatching, but
he has been found guilty in the court of public opinion.

(32:54):
As some of the paranoia dies down. Six years later,
then Mississippi Governor Fielding Right looked over the case and
he said, hey, let's have Dolan take a lie detector
test because those are super helpful. Right, people still stooke
lie detectors for science at this time, and Dolan past
is polygraph test. He was given a limited suspended sentence.

(33:17):
He was eventually set free, But now he became a freeman,
despite you know, probably not being welcome in Pascagoula for
the rest of his life. But now the thing is,
as we closed today's episode, you might not be surprised
to learn that modern historians wonder whether Dolan was guilty

(33:38):
of any crime at all, because there's some of the
stuff you just mentioned in the zeitgeist at the time. Yeah, Ben,
what was the actually convicted of? It was just for
like this, this this home invasion, like the when when
we say attempted murder, the punching, like then the knocking
out of the teeth or what? What? Which? Which crime
exactly was he connected to? Yeah, he was penning with

(33:59):
the assault on the Heidelberg's the one with the iron
bar got it. So the teeth knocking out incident. Just
making sure I'm keeping these straight. But again in any
of the court documents, and maybe they tried to make
the case but it didn't fly. I mean, obviously, you
know with these kinds of things, they want to have
an ironclad case. They don't want to um confuse the
jury of in any way. But they would have been

(34:20):
so aware of this string of attacks, and the hair
part of it was so front and center, right, I'm
wondering how they were able to quiet the public's you know,
concerns if hair was not part of the equation. Yeah,
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

(34:44):
lot of townsfolk considered him a trader. It also would
have been really easy to plant that hair plant that
hairball during Dolan's arrest. You could also tamper with the
evidence that got sent to the FBI. But now with
this point we have to say, it will probably never
be clear whether Dolan was the genuine phantom barber of

(35:06):
Pascagoula or whether he was a scapegoat who was sort
of sacrificed on the altar of public safety, right or
the altar of public um comfort. You go, there we go,
And now this this draws to a closed man. Uh,
I think we both love these stories, but no, we

(35:26):
gotta gotta check with Max. Max, you joined up with
Ridiculous History because you're pretty familiar with hair crime, correct, Sure,
I know a lot about a hair crime that just
in tim you know, there's there's. It comes in many
shapes and sizes. I mean, you could consider a bad
haircut to be a hair crime, you know, against humanity,
or at the very least, like a friend of mine

(35:48):
recently got a haircut that ended up being something of
a mullet, and even the barber or the stylist themselves
were were deeply apologetic and had to make it right.
You can't make amends for hair crime, but there are
some hair crimes that are unforgivable. Yeah, it's true. I
think everybody's had a disappointing haircut at some point or another.

(36:08):
I was actually growing up. I got threatened with hair
crime by the lady who cuts young Ben Bullen's hair.
I was, you know, I think she was trying to
help me. In retrospect, I want to see what you
guys think. So I was a child of very particular
and peculiar taste. I had a haircut that I liked.
It was a bowl cut, and I wanted that. I thought,

(36:30):
that's fine, I will wear jogging suits and have a
bowl cut for the rest of my life. Nothing weird.
And then she would regularly threaten me with that. She
was saying that if I did not behave she was
going to give me a mohawk. Wow, messing with me
or helping me. I would have been so accidentally cool,
accidentally cool. No, it's true. I once have supported a

(36:52):
flat top for a period I did, which is a
very nineteen thirties kind of look. You know what, I
mean where at shaved on the side and literally get
the style it with palm aide and it's it's perfectly
flat on the top. I remember I had this barber
named Dennis who drove a motorcycle and I thought he
was so cool. He kind of looked like Willie Nelson,
but he was all about giving me this flaptop and
my parents seemed cool with it. Um. I also had

(37:14):
a rat tail for a little while. God, the choices
we make. Sometimes we we we can commit hair crimes
against ourselves. That's true, self inflicted hair crime. It's it's
a big concern. We should probably make a charity or
non uh in GEO specifically for hair crime, but we'll
have to do that off the air. Thanks so much

(37:35):
for tuning in everyone. We hope you enjoyed this episode.
We want to hear your stories of obscure local crimes,
especially the weirder the better, honestly, and we have an
announcement you can hopefully by the time you hear this,
you can send those suggestions to our email address. Brought
it back, finally did it? We gave ridiculous romance and

(37:57):
email address. We had to also have one. You know it.
It did seem like it was time people have been
sending stuff. Well, actually there was a time where we
were calling out the email address as though it existed. Uh,
and then people were clearly firing letters off into the abyss.
I wonder if those go someplace where now maybe they'll
be redirected to us. Probably not. So you've ever emailed
us in the past at Ridiculous at I heeart radio
dot com, maybe give another go. But um, we would

(38:20):
really love to hear from you, and uh, maybe we'll
start doing an occasional mail bag episode. I think we should.
We love hearing suggestions for topics and we really just
love hearing from you, So please do start again sending
emails to Ridiculous at I heart radio dot com while
you're at it. While you're on the internet, you can
also find us as individuals. I am at how Now

(38:40):
Noel Brown on Instagram. You can find me on Twitter
getta peek behind the scenes of the stuff I'm working
on for upcoming episodes I've been bowling hs W. You
can also see by various visual misadventures at ben Bowling
bow l I and on Instagram. Hey Max. Thanks thanks
to our super producer Max, who's at actually here. We

(39:01):
don't get out much. This is very big. This is
a big deal for us. Max. Yes, So thanks to Max,
Thanks for actually being here and hanging with us. We've
been so lonely. Thanks to Max's brother Alex, who composed
this theme True Story Thinks, as well to our own
non hair criminal research associate, Gabe Bluesier, and of course

(39:22):
thanks to the my number one pick for a hair
criminal here at iHeart Jonathan STRICKLANDK the Quister. I know
what you're up to. Oh yeah, let's see you next time, folks.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to

(39:43):
your favorite shows.