The Phantom Barber

Summary

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True Weird Stuff – “The Phantom Barber” (June 5, 2026)

Main Theme

This episode of True Weird Stuff dives into the bizarre, unsolved case of the “Phantom Barber” of Pascagoula, Mississippi, in 1942. Amid wartime paranoia, a mysterious intruder broke into homes and a convent at night—not to steal, but to cut the hair of sleeping children and women. The story is equal parts true crime, historical oddity, and psychological exploration, raising questions about justice, fetish, and social panic.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: Wartime Paranoia and Transformation (06:09–13:58)

• Pascagoula transformed from a sleepy Southern fishing village to a booming industrial city due to the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation and WWII.
• Wartime brought blackouts, mass migration, and fear of foreign saboteurs. Daily life changed: rationing, constant vigilance, and government propaganda were pervasive.
• Quote:
  “Life in Pascagoula during wartime, though—you could say the vibes were a little bit off.”
  — Sherry Lynch (06:09)

The First Attacks: Hair as Power, Symbol, and Target (16:28–18:53)

• On June 5, 1942, an intruder entered Our Lady of Victory’s convent, cutting the hair of sleeping girls. More break-ins followed, always targeting sleeping females, from small children to adult women.
• Police struggled to understand motives—nothing was stolen but hair, and there was no clear precedent or pattern.
• Quote:
  “No one was harmed. Well, not exactly anyway. Nothing was stolen except for the children’s hair. And there really wasn’t much in the way of legal precedent for that in Pascagoula. Who ever heard of someone climbing through a convent window to hack the hair off the head of a sleeping child?”
  — Sherry Lynch (18:03)

Escalation: Violence and Panic (23:35–28:47)

• June 13, 1942: The attacks escalated—Mr. and Mrs. Heidelberg were brutally attacked with a metal pipe in their home. No theft, but severe physical harm.
• Police and the public speculated about sabotage; absenteeism increased at the shipyard; fear and suspicion ruled the night.
• Quote:
  “Clearly whatever this was, it had escalated beyond snipping hair into violent assault.”
  — Sherry Lynch (25:39)

Investigation and Anxious Theorizing: One Culprit, or Two? (27:43–29:53)

• Authorities wondered if the Phantom Barber and the pipe-wielding attacker were the same person—fingerprints at different scenes did not match.
• Motive theories included espionage, sabotage, or psychosexual obsession, notably trichophilia (hair fetish).

The Arrest of William Dolan: Scapegoat or Guilty? (36:12–43:13)

• Local German chemist William Dolan, a known Nazi sympathizer, was arrested and charged with attempted murder of the Heidelbergs and suspected of the hair attacks. Weak evidence (a bag of hair near his shack, Nazi sympathies, timing of the attacks stopping) led to his conviction.
• Dolan was eventually released after passing a polygraph and receiving a full pardon, yet his life ended in further mystery—a misidentified corpse and disputed identity.
• Quote:
  “His arrest in August 1942 coincided with the end of this strange spade of break ins and assaults that had terrorized the town for months. Was Dolan just a handy scapegoat?... This theory doesn’t explain the Phantom Barber’s assault on the shining blonde heads of sleeping little girls. But honestly, what could?”
  — Sherry Lynch (43:13)

Trichophilia: The Psychological Perspective (43:13–44:40)

• Hosts explain trichophilia as a hair fetish—often harmless, but in this case, criminal.
• The psychology of breaking into homes and cutting hair was discussed as a search for power and control, not just hair itself.

Morality, Rashness, and Social Panic (54:04–62:59)

• Dolan’s Nazi sympathies made him a perfect scapegoat for a town steeped in fear and suspicion.
• The hosts compare the mass paranoia and scapegoating of 1942 with modern social divisions.
• Quote:
  “The entire town is plunged in an inky darkness and no one’s on the street. Who’s going to see you break a window at the gas station and empty the register? … it was chaotic and you still had break-ins… But the snipping of the hair of sleeping people—that ended abruptly with the arrest of William Dolan.”
  — Sherry Lynch (51:42)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Historical Context:
  “The best thing you can say about that fear is that it pushed the majority of Americans to accept that certain sacrifices would be necessary for the greater good.”
  — Sherry Lynch (11:22)
• On Fetish and Consent:
  “There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as everyone involved is an adult capable of consent. Trichophilia becomes a problem when you’re breaking into a home in the middle of the night to snip the locks of a six-year-old child.”
  — Sherry Lynch (43:13)
• On Escalation and Profiling:
  “There was the definite appearance of escalation… but the escalation was so abrupt. Like we literally went from snipping someone’s hair to beating this woman almost to death.”
  — Sherry Lynch (52:19)
• On Crime and Hysteria:
  “The rumors surrounding these facts, sometimes bordering on the fantastic, are setting the stage for a wave of mass hysteria.”
  — Newspaper editorial, read by Archive/Newscaster (29:21)
• On William Dolan’s Pardon:
  “At minimum, he was guilty of being German, and they were going to get him.”
  — Sherry Lynch (74:27)

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Timestamps for Significant Segments

• Pascagoula’s Wartime Transformation: 06:09–13:58
• First Phantom Barber Break-In: 16:28–18:53
• Escalation to Pipe Attacks: 23:35–25:39
• Rise of Mass Panic and Sabotage Theories: 27:18–29:53
• Arrest and Investigation of William Dolan: 36:12–43:13
• Psychosexual Motivation & Trichophilia: 43:13–44:40
• Discussion: One Criminal or Two? 51:10–71:54
• Analysis of Community Reaction & Modern Parallels: 58:51–62:59
• Verdicts and Theories: 66:47–86:44
• Postscript: Governor Fielding Wright & Motives for Pardon: 93:45–94:47

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Hosts’ Theories & Reflections

Single vs. Multiple Perpetrators

• The hosts lean toward the theory that there were two perpetrators: one focused on break-ins, another driven by a hair fetish. The abrupt escalation in violence without transitional behaviors is suspicious.
• Max Sweeten draws parallels to other known criminal escalations (e.g., Golden State Killer), but notes this case doesn't fit that pattern.
  • Quote: “You’d have a hard time today making a case on something so flimsy.” (74:10)

Dolan—Guilty or Not?

• Both hosts believe Dolan was likely not the Phantom Barber, despite his unsavory views and being a natural target. His conviction rested more on public fear and scapegoating than evidence.
• His eventual pardon, issued by a racist, Nazi-sympathetic governor, casts further doubt on justice being served.

The Lasting Mystery

• The true identity and motivation of the Phantom Barber remain unsolved.
• As times have changed, so has psychological understanding of fetish and crime; much remains unknowable.

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Notable Moments & Cultural Reflections

• Trichophilia Explained: The episode is respectful but direct about fetish, carefully distinguishing consensual kink from criminal obsession.
• Historical Parallels: The climate of suspicion in 1942 is likened to social attitudes in 2026, emphasizing how mass paranoia facilitates scapegoating and division.
• Dark Humor and Tone:
  “Who ever heard of someone climbing through a convent window to hack the hair off the head of a sleeping child?”
  (18:03)
  The show maintains its trademark blend of empathy, curiosity, and black comedy.

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Conclusion and Takeaways

• The case remains a chilling cold case, unsolved and likely never to be forensically closed.
• The social and psychological backdrop reveals as much about the era as the crimes themselves.
• Quote: “If you’re not hurting anybody, I don’t care. Ain’t none of my business. But the minute…you prop a wheelbarrow next to a window and…kneel next to the bed of a sleeping 6-year-old child with a pair of haircut scissors…I need you to hear me. You need to get some help.”
  — Sherry Lynch (92:32)

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For Further Content

• Next episode tease: Exploring cults, cons, and the Unholy City (49:29).
• Listener Call to Action: Share feedback, rate and review, visit trueweirdstuff.com for extras.

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Transcript

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

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[Sherry Lynch]

hope you know how much all of us here appreciate you. You are the people we're making this show for and your feedback means the world to us. We were so blown away for this show to win as many awards as it has. I mean, at this point we're working for hardware and handouts, true. But at the end of the day it's you people will walk up to us on the street. I had a guy wave at me wearing a True weird Stuff T shirt at the park. It just is the coolest thing and that's 100% you and thank you.

[Max Sweeten]

And we're just covering costs to be able to present this to you. We're not really making any money with it, so if you could do us a favor and patronize any sponsors that you hear throughout the show, that would be great. Also, just go on whatever platform you listen to it and please rate and review it. It really helps us in getting discovered. And if you have a suggestion for anything, just reach out to us at our website TrueWeirdStuff. And thank you so much for listening.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Several members of an Amish breakaway group have been convicted of hate crimes in a series of forcible hair and beard cutting attacks. Prosecutors claimed Samuel Mullet Sr. Along with 15 followers, terrorized this religious settlement in Ohio last year. During the trial, Mullet was portrayed as a man who thought he was above the law and punished those who challenged his authority by chopping off their hair, which carries spiritual significance for the Amish. Mullet wasn't accused of cutting anyone's hair himself. But prosecutors say he encouraged his sons and others to carry out his plans. They say he also mocked the victims in jailhouse phone calls. Defense attorneys never denied that the attacks happened, but they argued that calling them hate crimes was overreaching. The charges against Mullet and the others included conspiracy, evidence tampering and obstruction of justice. The defendants who were involved in the hair and beard cutting face prison terms

[Sherry Lynch]

of 10 years or more non consensual hair hacking, hair jacking. You've probably never really given much thought to the idea that hair might make you the target of a crime. And who expects the Amish to be involved in something so bizarre? It happened, though, in Ohio in 2011, and as you heard in that clip, the ringleader's name was Sam Mullet. Mullet. It's almost too much to believe.

[Archive/Newscaster]

US Authorities have raided the compound of a breakaway Amish religious group and arrested seven men on federal hate crime charges in hair cutting attacks against Amish men and women. Cutting the hair is a highly offensive act to the traditional Amish, who believe the Bible instructs women to let their hair grow long and and men to grow beards and stop shaving once they marry.

[Sherry Lynch]

Hair. Just strands of keratin there to protect your scalp from the sun's rays, to protect your eyes from dust and dirt to help regulate your body temperature. But beyond all the practical uses for hair, it's deeply symbolic, powerfully tied to culture, from the biblical tale of Samson and the Delilah, to Rapunzel in her castle tower, to Jo March in the novel Little Women cutting off and selling her hair to help her injured father. Hair is everywhere in our stories and songs. How many other body parts have their own classic Broadway show, which is playing somewhere right now all these years after its October 1967 off Broadway debut.

[Max Sweeten]

Give me a head with hair.

[Sherry Lynch]

Long, beautiful hair. Shining, gleaming, steaming flax and wax. Give me down to their hair. Shoulder longer.

[Actor/Voice Actor]

Your baby there, Mama. Everywhere. Daddy.

[Sherry Lynch]

Daddy. Some people are so obsessed with hair, they're willing to break the law just for the thrill of touching it or stealing it. Like the man they called the Phantom Barber

[Archive/Newscaster]

and make out a small beam of light.

[Sherry Lynch]

True.

[Max Sweeten]

Weird stuff.

[Sherry Lynch]

Summer 1942 in Pascagoula, Mississippi. What used to be a sleepy little Southern town had been transformed by World War II. Pascagoula was home to the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation. Even today, it's still the largest private employer in the state. The company was founded in 1938 and by 1942 offered so many Jobs that the population of Pascagoula tripled from 5,000 to 15,000 almost overnight. What had been a quiet fishing village hammered by the Great Depression morphed into an industrial powerhouse of a city. So many newcomers flood At Pascagoula, the barracks housing had to be hastily erected and many locals welcomed strangers into their homes. Workers at the shipyard in Pascagoula put together more than 100 ships and they were credited with contributing to the Allied victory in World War II. Life in Pascagoula during wartime, though, you could say the vibes were a little bit off. There was tension and paranoia with so many unfamiliar faces. Couldn't any one of those strangers be an enemy spy? Crazy as that sounds now, it was a real fact of life. That the U.S. army imposed restrictions of its own on the town was a reminder that the enemy could be anyone, anywhere, and that every single citizen was engaged in the fight for freedom. From GEICO Subconscious News, I'm Tammy Racing thoughts broadcasting from your brain. Tonight's top worry. If something happens to your apartment and you need to like, stay in a hotel and pay for it, that would be crazy, right?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

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[Sherry Lynch]

That would be crazy, Tammy. But you got surprisingly affordable renters insurance through geico, so it could be covered,

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

giving you peace of mind.

[Sherry Lynch]

Aw, I love a story that ends well. Next up, love stories. Are they all they're cracked up to be? It feels good to worry less. It feels good to GEICO Blackout regulations were announced across the state of Mississippi.

[Archive/Newscaster]

The exact time the blackout will be ordered will not be known in advance. However, 24 hours notice will be given through the press and radio as to the day.

[Sherry Lynch]

Blackouts weren't as simple as folks just turning off the lights.

[Archive/Newscaster]

All street lights will be extinguished at the start of the blackout. All transportation must stop at the beginning of the blackout and remain stationary until the end, unless ordered to move by a duly authorized policeman or civil defense warden.

[Sherry Lynch]

The blackouts would be strictly enforced. But people weren't expected to just cower in the darkness.

[Archive/Newscaster]

People must live during the blackout hours. It is therefore necessary for each home to have a room available for use during the blackout periods. It is not necessary to go to a great expense in preparing this room. The government needs your money to buy guns and other materials necessary for our armed forces to use. A cheap paper may be purchased that will serve the purpose in blacking out windows. The small red lights used as Christmas tree decorations may be used to an advantage in blackout rooms. Those who care to use a flashlight may place two Layers of newspaper over the glass lens provided. A rubber band or string is used to hold this paper in place.

[Sherry Lynch]

Does it sound a little bit silly to us, this fear of German or Japanese warplanes bombing small town America? Like why did our great or great great grandparents have such main character energy that they were convinced that the Axis powers were gunning for some random main street? But here's the thing. They weren't crazy or dramatic because in June 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced near Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast and fired 17 shel. The only damage done was the destruction of the backstop on the post baseball field. But still the intent was clear.

[Archive/Newscaster]

The submarine aimed its shots at Fort Stevens, but the aim was bad.

[Sherry Lynch]

One Colonel Doney told the press that the shells had come close to doing real damage. Too damn close were his exact words. And close to civilians as well.

[Archive/Newscaster]

The shell that exploded near Delora beach landed 10 yards from the home of Mr. And Mrs. Jean Hefling. None of the shrapnel struck the Hefling home. The Heflings and their two children were frightened by the explosions.

[Sherry Lynch]

Coastal Oregon may have been a couple thousand miles away from Pascagoula, but the implied threat was still too close to home. Because Pascagoula was an important cog in the American war machine. Why wouldn't the enemy do everything in its power to shut down the Ingalls shipyard? Pascagoula embraced the war effort even before America officially entered the fight. Within four days of the attack on Pearl harbor in December 1941, more than 500 residents of Pascagoula packed themselves into a community meeting on civil defense. That meeting coincided with Congress officially declaring war on Germany and Italy. Pearl harbor sent millions of Americans into a panic. If the Japanese could successfully bomb the US Navy in Hawaii, who could say that similar attacks on the mainland weren't a possibility? The best thing you can say about that fear is that it pushed the majority of Americans to accept that certain sacrifices would be necessary for the greater good. By spring 1942, war rationing was underway. There were limits placed on purchases of gasoline, clothing and food. Posters produced by the United States Office of War Information began popping up everywhere, urging Americans to do with less so that the troops could have more. Ration booklets were issued to families. Special stamps needed to buy meat and butter, fruits and vegetables, sugar and clothing, tires and fuel oil. Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula needed an enormous workforce. And with so many men enlisting and heading to the front, women and black people in that part of the world suddenly found all kinds of new opportunities awaiting them. Jobs that used to go only to white men. Good jobs like welder and electrician. Not to mention all of the the non war related positions that were suddenly open in businesses and factories and schools. The place was an instant boom town. But the mood in Pascagoula wasn't the shiny optimism in a place you'd expect suddenly flush with growth. The mood was darker than that. It was more guarded. The old timers, they barely recognized the Pascagoula they'd been born in. And they no longer knew their neighbors. Too many new faces now. Hard to figure out who could be trusted.

[Archive/Newscaster]

Pascagoula Police Chief A.A. ezel has instructed police to check up on all stragglers at night and to redouble the watch for suspicious characters.

[Sherry Lynch]

A catchphrase everywhere was loose lips sink ships. The way folks saw it, freedom was on the line. Decency was on the line. Curtains were drawn, doors were locked, eyes were averted on the street. The Office of War Information was pumping out propaganda posters, newsreels and radio broadcasts.

[Actor/Voice Actor]

Every German is a potential source of trouble. Therefore there must be no fraternization with any the Of. Of the German people. Fraternization means making friends. The German people are not our friends. You will not associate with German men, women or children. You will not associate with them on familiar terms, either in public or in private. You will not visit in their homes, nor will you ever take them into your confidence. However friendly, however sorry, however sick of the Nazi party they may seem, they cannot come back into the civilized fold just by sticking out their hand and saying, I'm sorry, don't clasp that hand. It's not the kind of a hand you can clasp in friendship.

[Sherry Lynch]

The Japanese weren't spared this treatment. Trust me. This clip features an actor wearing very bad makeup to try to appear Japanese while speaking in a caricature of a Japanese accent. It is so racist that your jaw drops.

[Actor/Voice Actor]

We think you are stupid. An admirable quality for an enemy to have. You say you can destroy us by outworking us. You must find yourself. This is one of the most amusing ideas of all. You have not let our workers have you. Meet them now and see why I lie. They work longer hours than you do. Twice as long, quite often. Why not? They are not working by the clock. They are working to win the war.

[Sherry Lynch]

So there was Pascagoula, a very small town that saw its population explode sevenfold almost overnight. The Engel shipyard was a bustle of lights and noise and activity 24 hours a day the war had come to this quiet village on the Gulf. You could feel the tension in the humid air. No wonder the people were edgy and suspicious. They were right to be. As it turned out. On the night of June 5, 1942, there was a most peculiar and alarming incident at the Our lady of Victory's convent. The Sisters of Perpetual Adoration have been conducting a school at their convent since 1882. Some students boarded at the convent. They were tucked into their beds asleep, when an intruder crept into their sleeping quarters.

[Archive/Newscaster]

According to reports, the children, Edna Marie Hadle, age 7, Mary Evelyn Briggs, age 10, and Laura Briggs, age 8, were asleep when Mary Evelyn was awakened by someone fingering her hair. She was startled and the would be hair cutter put his finger to his lips saying the child called out to Sister Camille and the man made his escape by a window. Laura Briggs was the only one to escape losing her tresses, the other two girls hair having been whacked off.

[Sherry Lynch]

Looking at the girl's badly butchered hair, it had been lopped off in ragged chunks. Police theorized that the man had used either a razor or a pocket knife. The children couldn't provide a description beyond saying that it was a man who might have been short and stout. The entire incident was strange and puzzling. No one was harmed. Well, not exactly anyway. Nothing was stolen except for the children's hair. And there really wasn't much in the way of legal precedent for that in Pascagoula. Who ever heard of someone climbing through a convent window to hack the hair off the head of a sleeping child? Any hopes the police had that this was one heck of a weird one off, were dashed just three days later. June 8, 1942.

[Archive/Newscaster]

This time the victim was small Carol petey, daughter of Mr. And Mrs. David G. Petey of Pascagoula Street. Ragged handfuls of hair were cut from from the head of the child and the hair was apparently taken away by the intruder.

[Sherry Lynch]

The circumstances suggested a perpetrator who was bold to the point of recklessness. He'd entered the Petey home while adults were present and awake. Mrs. Petey was away, but another couple, the Henshaws, were staying to help Mr. Petey look after the children in her absence. Now, at the time of the break in, Mr. Petey was was asleep in his bed. Mr. Henshaw was asleep on the porch. But Mrs. Henshaw was awake, sitting in the living room, reading.

[Witness/Interviewee]

I heard a noise in Carol and David's room, but I thought David was having a nightmare as he frequently does.

[Sherry Lynch]

David was Carol's twin brother. The children shared a bedroom.

[Witness/Interviewee]

I went to the dining room window but didn't see anything. And when I came back into the hall, I turned on the light. When the light went on, the noise stopped and I thought it was nothing. I turned off the light again and went back to the living room.

[Sherry Lynch]

Despite finding nothing amiss, Mrs. Henshaw was uneasy. She went out to the porch and awakened her husband. The man worked the night shift at Ingles, and it was time for him to get ready for work anyway. Would he please come with her to check on the children? At first, everything seemed in order, and then Mrs. Henshaw saw it on the bed she herself slept in. Right there next to the twins. Sand on the coverlet.

[Witness/Interviewee]

I knew no one had been on my bed with shoes on. Then I looked closer and saw a big footprint in sand on a mattress pad folded on a suitcase at the foot of the bed.

[Sherry Lynch]

The venetian blinds and the only window in the room were down and appeared untouched. When Mr. Henshaw had a closer look, though, he saw that the window screen had been cut and the window unlatched. It was only then that the couple looked more closely at the sleeping twins and realized that swaths of Carol's hair had been shorn from her little head. Mr. Petey was roused and the police were called. Fingerprints were found on the windowsill in the back bedroom. Police compared those prints to the ones left on a windowsill at the convent and found they didn't match. According to Pascagoula Police Officer R.E. jones, there may be two or more

[Archive/Newscaster]

working together, but they don't seem to be the same.

[Sherry Lynch]

Prince, how would you even go about calculating the odds of two hair fetish burglars operating in the same town at the same time? It seemed incredibly unlikely that there was more than one perpetrator. What about that footprint? Some in the town wondered. That doesn't tell you anything.

[Archive/Newscaster]

That footprint is no use at all in identifying this intruder. For one, the man was wearing shoes. That print was smeared, though I will say it did appear to be large.

[Sherry Lynch]

The fingerprints may not have matched, but the MO sure did. The hair Bandit had used a wheelbarrow to reach a window into the convent kitchen. He cut the window screen, and as he climbed through, he left a footprint on the stove. He was quiet, police said, and clearly very gentle, since his victims mostly slept through the entire event. Carol Petey said she felt something touching her hair, but was so sleepy that it seemed that she just couldn't quite open her eyes.

[Witness/Interviewee]

I brushed Carol's hair before bed and tied it back in a ribbon. That man had turned the child's head and cut almost all the hair from the back. Only the pieces at the front were their original length. Oh, that poor girl.

[Sherry Lynch]

Pascagoula was troubled enough by the fact that an unknown person was creeping about at night, slicing through window screens, entering homes. But it was what that unknown person was doing once inside that kicked off a panic. Burglary, robbery, the taking of valuables that at least made sense. But this, this unwholesome attack on the heads of children. Then on June 13, the perpetrator, now dubbed the Phantom Barber struck again. And this time his targets were all grown up. That next attack came in the wee hours of Saturday, June 13th and it was nearly fatal.

[Archive/Newscaster]

The victims were Mr. And Mrs. Terrell Heidelberg who became aware that an intruder had entered their home only when Mrs. Heidelberg was struck across the mouth with a heavy two and a half foot pipe which the attacker later left on the blood stained bed. The young woman rolled to her side under the impact of the blow and received the next downward sweep of the weapon on her shoulder. At this instant Mrs. Heidelberg awoke and raised her right arm which took the full force of a terrific blow which narrowly escaped shattering the bone.

[Sherry Lynch]

The man then struck Mr. Heidelberg twice on the head leaving long gashes on the sides of his head. The pipe just missed clipping Heidelberg on the temple. Then the attacker turned his attention back to Mrs. Lillian Heidelberg, viciously striking her several more times with the pipe. Then he dropped the weapon and flung himself through the same bedroom window he'd entered. On the dresser by the side of the bed was Heidelberg's wallet and a small pile of change. The intruder left both untouched and the Heidelberg's bleeding and unconscious. Mrs. Heidelberg came to first and called. Police officers on duty were slow to respond as they were trying to apprehend a prowler a few blocks over. Of course by the time they arrived the intruder was long gone.

[Archive/Newscaster]

The injured couple was taken to Jackson County Hospital. In addition to numerous bruises, three of Mrs. Heidelberg's front teeth were knocked out completely and were found in the bed. Her lip was severely cut. Doctors who treated her believed that several other teeth were so badly damaged that they will have to be removed. She was kept at the hospital. Mr. Heidelberg was treated and allowed to leave.

[Sherry Lynch]

Clearly whatever this was, it had escalated beyond snipping hair into violent assault. Bloodhounds were brought in. The dogs almost immediately picked up a scent just outside the window through which the man had entered the Heidelberg home. The dogs lost the scent In a thicket of brush at the Market and Jackson street intersection. Police theorized that the suspect had hidden a bicycle there and used it to make his escape. But the dogs did turn up a little pile of evidence. A pair of bloody gloves dropped by the perpetrator as he fled through the trees. The gloves were a woolen knit pair belonging to Mrs. Heidelberg. They'd been taken from the glove box of the Heidelberg car. The dogs also alerted on a pair of pliers and a screwdriver found lying in the street in front of the Heidelberg home. The tools had also been taken from the car. From our perspective here in the harrowing days of the 21st century, when we're all citizen sleuths hooked on the true crime drip, this seems like an awfully big escalation. One day you're quietly snipping the hair off the heads of sleeping children, the next you're beating a woman half to death with a pipe. Is it possible that Pascagoula in the summer of 1942 was being stalked by two different assailants? One a hair obsessed freak with a knack for breaking and entering, and the other a more typical thug? Police were being kept busy by nightly reports of attempted break ins.

[Archive/Newscaster]

Numerous houses have been entered or tampered with, and many reports of lurkers have reached the police. In only one case was money or anything of value taken.

[Sherry Lynch]

And now, along with those three little girls sporting badly chopped hair, a couple had been brutally beaten. None of it made sense to Police Chief Azell.

[Archive/Newscaster]

I am reluctant to admit this, but I see no other motive involved here than a calculated effort at sabotage through the spreading of terror among the families of working men in an important shipbuilding plant here, thus causing them to neglect their work or to stay off the job to protect their families.

[Sherry Lynch]

It was true that Terrell Heidelberg worked at Ingalls shipyard. It was also true that the people of both Pascagoula and nearby Moss Point were now taking extensive precautions for their own safety. Windows were nailed closed, Bars were installed on doors. Applications for firearms permits piled up. Folks were sleeping with loaded guns at hand, and Police Chief Azell requested residents to stay indoors after dark.

[Archive/Newscaster]

The fewer people are out, the easier it's going to be to spot a suspicious character.

[Sherry Lynch]

Women increasingly feared being out after dark, but they also feared being at home. Men were now staying home to increasing numbers to protect their families. Was AEL right about the whole panic being engineered by the enemy to slow down wartime production at the shipyard? Authorities at Ingalls acknowledged the spike in absenteeism but insisted that it hadn't reached a point of concern. It was the local panic that was more worrisome, as an editorial and a local paper putt it.

[Archive/Newscaster]

That this is a serious situation cannot be denied. But the rumors surrounding these facts, sometimes bordering on the fantastic, are setting the stage for a wave of mass hysteria. Both the police and the sheriff are doing all within their power to catch the criminals, and that they will be caught is a foregone conclusion. Conclusion.

[Sherry Lynch]

If the so called phantom barber had upped the ante by battering Lillian Heidelberg with a metal pipe, he was about to do it again. On Saturday, June 20, a man tried to force his way into the home of one H.M. brodus, father of Pascagoula Police Officer Raymond Brodus. Mr. Brodus, unlike the other victims, was wide awake when he heard the sound of his front door knob jiggling. This was followed by the sound of something heavy slamming into the door itself.

[Archive/Newscaster]

What do you mean with that boy?

[Sherry Lynch]

No answer and no one there. And then Brodus heard it. The sound of a side door scraping. Being in protest as it was forced

[Archive/Newscaster]

open, he pulled so hard that he broke loose a heavy catch and managed to swing the door open. Though it hadn't been used in several

[Sherry Lynch]

years, Mr. Brodus was face to face with the phantom barber.

[Archive/Newscaster]

The spring on my gun was broken, but I had a wrench. I swung at him as he came in.

[Sherry Lynch]

The blow landed hard and the two men wrestled for several minutes before the intruder escaped through that same door, slamming it Bro face. Then he was gone, sprinting through the darkness by way of backyards, vanishing before police could even arrive. And then the next night, Sunday, June 21st, he attacked again.

[Archive/Newscaster]

The phantom barber struck again, taking his strange toll of human hair from the head of Mrs. R.E. taylor of North Pascagoula Street.

[Sherry Lynch]

This time, the phantom barber brought along a little helper, a rag soaked in what police believed to be chloroform. I woke up about midnight with an awful smothering sensation. I called my husband and I told him I thought I was smothering to death. And then I became violently ill. I didn't even know my hair had been cut until I put my hand up to my head and I discovered that it was a lot shorter on one side than the other. When police searched the room, they found pieces of hair in the bed and a screen wide open in the bedroom window. Mrs. Taylor had been sleeping right next to that window. Could the phantom barber have hacked her hair without ever entering the room? It was a possibility. Mr. Taylor hadn't awakened until his wife called out for him. Their two married daughters, home for a visit with their parents, also slept through the incident. Unfortunately for the police, heavy rain had fallen all that Sunday late into the night. The ground outside the Taylor home was saturated. There were no discernible footprints to be found. The neighbors didn't see or hear anything, though police noted that the Taylor's bedroom window had been shielded from the street by two cars parked in the driveway. Foreign the idea that the Axis powers were running an espionage operation in Pascagoula, Mississippi in the summer of 1942 would be pretty hilarious if both the Allied and the Axis powers weren't guilty of some truly unhinged, bizarre and nutty plots and schemes like Operation Bat Bomb to name just one picture. A four foot long bomb packed with hundreds of live Mexican free tailed bats. Each bat has been fitted with a teeny tiny incendiary device created by the inventor of napalm. Now drop that bomb over Japan. The bats released from captivity would spread out over a 20 to 40 mile radius. They'd look for spots to roost. Buildings at that time in Japan were made mostly of wood and paper. Very flammable. Let the bats get cozy and then boom. Their wee bombs went off causing widespread fire, chaos, confusion and destruction. And this was no wild idea that got floated and then dismissed. They actually built the bomb. They made the little incendiary devices and they carefully attached them to the bats. The first test of the bat bomb resulted in a fire on an Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Next they headed to Utah and built a mock up of a Japanese village. This launch of the Bat Bomb was much more successful and the only reason it never made its debut on the war stage was a little something called the Manhattan Project. Research on the atom bomb pushed wacky weapons like the Bat Bomb aside, though I think you could argue that humanity would be far better off if our most dire weapon was a metal canister packed with flaming bats. Anywho, in a world where military experts dreamed up squadrons of bat arsonists, why not terrorize the ShipBuilders of Pascagoula, Mississippi by sneaking around in the dead of night with a pair of scissors. It took Police Chief Azell with the help of a detective from the Pinkerton Agency until the middle of August to make an arrest. The suspect's name was William Dolan, a 57 year old German chemist, educated at Harvard and MIT. Dolan, as it happened, had beef with Terrell Heidelberg's father, a local judge that police theorized Was Dolan's motive for so brutally attacking Judge Heidelberg's son and daughter in law. Okay, but what about the rest? The hair cutting the little girls? Dolan police said was a Nazi sympathizer bent on harm the American war effort.

[Archive/Newscaster]

Dolan is a German educated chemist. His motivation, Chief Ezel charged, was to impair the moral of war workers.

[Sherry Lynch]

Operation Great Clips, Operation Super Cuts. I mean, yes, a bad haircut can be traumatic, but traumatic enough to plunge the world into fascism. Though Dole wasn't initially charged in the haircutting assaults, a search of his home turned up a few pairs of barbering scissors. A bundle of human hair, including some strands that appeared to have been taken from little Carol Petey's sleeping head, was found hidden alongside a path near the shack the Dolings occupied. Cops had to eyeball that evidence since it'd be another decade before Watson and Crick announced the discovery of the double helix DNA. A discovery they stole from Rosalind Franklin. But I'll shut up about that for now. The jury needed only three hours to find William Dolan guilty of the attempted murder of Terrell and Lillian Heidelberg. Sentenced to 10 years in prison, Dolan was remanded to Parchment Prison deep in rural Sunflower County, Mississippi. Roughly 100 human it sticky miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. Dolan served six years of that sentence before Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright decided that maybe this was an innocent man who'd been railroaded into prison by a town panicked by wartime propaganda. What do you say we give this Dolan fellow a polygraph exam? Said the governor. Polygraph results aren't admissible in court today, but back then, this was legit science and an outstanding tool for law enforcement. Dolan passed his polygraph in 1948. He was released from prison on a limited and restricted parole three years later. The governor argued that Dolan had demonstrated model behavior since release. He deserved his full freedom. Governor Wright's successor went one better and granted Dolan a full pardon. The man tried to rebuild his life. He and his family left Pascagoula, moving 60 or miles so west to Waveland, Mississippi. And then Dolan disappeared. Before he left, though, he signed every single thing he owned over to his wife. Three weeks later, the body of a drowned man was found floating in the Mississippi river near Chalmette, Louisiana. Dolan's wife and stepdaughter identified the dead man without hesitation.

[Archive/Newscaster]

But the fingerprints of William Dolan received from Parchment Prison do not match those taken from the body.

[Sherry Lynch]

Dolan's widow, or maybe wife, was insistent that the drowned man was her husband, even though she said she didn't recognize the clothing he was wearing. And also she'd never known him to carry a watch. Yet a watch was found on the body. The shoes, though, those she knew, plus the scars matched one on the chin, another on the leg. The relic of an old bullet wound. She wasn't alone in her belief that this was the body of William Dolan. Old friends made the trip to Chalmette and also identified the body as his. The widow Dolan claimed that body and arranged for burial in the Cedar Rest cemetery in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. And then in April 1954, William Allen

[Archive/Newscaster]

Dolan mourned by his wife when authorities buried at Bay St. Louis. A body she said was his was reported today to have turned up alive in Sacramento, California. Sheriff John Egloff of Hancock County, Mississippi, said an FBI check of fingerprints had identified the Dolan picked up by Sacramento police as the Dolan for whom the funeral services were held.

[Sherry Lynch]

So William Dolan hadn't yet drowned after all. He'd been arrested for vagrancy in California. Fingerprints and mugshot taken before he was released. That man told police that he was a New York native. No mention at all of any ties in Mississippi. Police released him from custody and ordered him out of Sacramento. It was a mess. The body lying under the headstone, Mark Dolan, was immediately reclassified as unidentified. But Mrs. Dolan refused to accept that the man she buried wasn't her husband.

[Mrs. Dolan/Widow]

If that man had gotten out of the casket and apologized for getting drunk, I'd be living with him today.

[Sherry Lynch]

As for the man arrested in Sacramento,

[Mrs. Dolan/Widow]

the only way I would believe it was him is if I talked to him on the phone or saw him personally, because he would know what to call me.

[Sherry Lynch]

Was it grief that made it impossible for Mrs. Dolan to accept that the man she loved was capable of such cruel abandonment and deception? Was it grief or was it greed? The Mississippi state legislature had been in the process of making a $2,500 payout to the widow Dolan for her husband's un warranted imprisonment for the attack on the Heidelbergs. That was a sum equal to over $30,000 today. And Mrs. Dolan was not pleased to learn that the state had decided to hold that money back until it could be given to Mr. William Dolan himself. In February 1955, Mrs. Dolan changed her mind about just who was buried in the grave set aside for her husband. Now she believed William Dolan, she called him Blackie, was still alive somewhere. What convinced her the insurance Company flatly refused to pay out the life insurance policy.

[Mrs. Dolan/Widow]

I went to California where they said he was arrested. I looked at his signature. The handwriting was Blackie's, all right. The pictures still don't look like him. He must have swollen or gained a lot of weight. But the handwriting is his.

[Sherry Lynch]

She could offer no explanation as to why her husband bolted and allowed his family and friends to think he was dead.

[Mrs. Dolan/Widow]

I don't know why he left home. He didn't have anything to run away from. Nobody done nothing to him.

[Sherry Lynch]

A mystery. Like the mystery of just who exactly was that man buried? And William Dolan's grave?

[Mrs. Dolan/Widow]

I don't know nothing about that one. And the New Orleans police don't know anything either. But if anybody wants him, can come dig him up if they like.

[Sherry Lynch]

The truth of what really happened that summer in Pascagoula is unknown. William Dolan hotly denied being the Phantom barber. And he was ultimately exonerated in the attack on the Heidelbergs. Yet it's a fact that his arrest in August 1942 coincided with the end of this strange spade of break ins and assaults that had terrorized the town for months. Was Dolan just a handy scapegoat? He was German, Proudly so, and loud in his his support for Hitler. At a time when tensions were high in a place where people had reason to be guarded and suspicious of anyone voicing anti American sentiments, it's easy to see how someone like Dolan could be branded a spy, a saboteur, an enemy. This theory doesn't explain the Phantom barber's assault on the shining blonde heads of sleeping little girls. But honestly, what could? The answer is trichophilia. The deriving of sexual pleasure from looking at or touching or even eating human hair. Could be all kinds of hair or a very specific color or texture of hair. Nothing wrong with that. As long as everyone involved is an adult capable of consent. Trichophilia becomes becomes a problem when you're breaking into a home in the middle of the night to snip the locks of a six year old child. It would be weird and baffling today, never mind. In Pascagoula in 1942, at least today a trichophiliac can get their fix watching Pantene shampoo commercials on Repeat. But in 1942, when a fetish crosses the line into obsession, when it begins to cause the individual distress, when they begin acting on urges that involve another human being who either doesn't consent or can't consent, that's when a fetish becomes a disorder. That's when shame and anguish can morph into pathology and even violence. When you think about it, the phantom bar barber had a taste for a lot more than human hair. His victims were always asleep in their beds. The most vulnerable and helpless a person can be. He violated first the sanctity of their homes and then their bodies. That had to be part of it, part of the thrill. His complete power and control over his victims. Their utter helplessness. Helplessness as he raised his steel shears, gleaming strands slipping like cool silk into his waiting hand. His heart beating so hard it was a wonder to him that the whole house didn't wake from the sound. What must it have been like to live in Pascagoula when the phantom barber stalked the streets? That's the signal. They're calling for a blackout tonight. That's nothing like regular darkness. The kind of darkness that a person's eyes adjust to. The kind of darkness where you can suddenly hear the sounds of the night world. No, a blackout is a different kind of dark. Because all around you, you feel the weight of hidden things. Hidden people, like prey, crouched, knowing that the slightest movement may bring down the talons of the circling hawk. The threat was everywhere. The skies might conceal the enemy plane. Submarines lurked off the coast. Any familiar face could belong to the one building the bomb, chambering the bullet, igniting the blaze. For the shipbuilders of Pascagoula, the war wasn't happening in some faraway place. It was right here. At home, too. No place was safe. Even the sisters and children at Our lady of Victory's convent could tell you that. And so a man was arrested and then pardoned. A funeral was held, and then the dead man was found alive. And in all of that drama, something was almost forgotten. The phantom barber was never caught, never identified, never brought to justice. Maybe that man was William Dolan. Maybe it wasn't. We don't really know people. Not even the people we love. It's amazing, isn't it? The secrets folks can keep. Have you ever helped to clean out a person's home after they've died? It's the strangest experience. A mix of sorting through the humble remnants of a life. The worn toothbrush, the battered spatula, the discarded pairs of reading glasses. And in all of that everyday clutter, you'll almost always find something inexplicable, like an old wedding band that no one can account for. A manila envelope stuffed with yellowing paperwork. Wait. Was Mom's brother in an asylum? Photographs of strangers leaning against old timey cars. Or standing stiffly posed at what might have been a wedding or maybe a christening. An old unloaded Colt single action revolver. Revolver wrapped in oily cloth. A creased envelope holding the brittle remains of a single dried carnation. A small suitcase packed with carefully folded little cotton dresses. What child were those? A stack of old newspapers dating back to World War II. A random old fire hazard if ever there was one. And what's. What's that?

[Mrs. Dolan/Widow]

Ew.

[Sherry Lynch]

It's a plastic bag filled with hair. You tell yourself that people back in the day were so weirdly sentimental, saving a lock of hair from every child's first haircut. I mean, what else could it be, right? It's a bag of human hair. Didn't the Victorians make crafts out of hair and stuff? Yikes. The plastic bag is cloudy with age, but when the light catches it just right, those blonde strands seem to almost glow. Creepy. Why would anyone save such a morbid souvenir that's going straight into the trash? Next time on True Weird Stuff, we're going to take a look at cults and cons and charlatans. We're going to pay a visit to Unholy City. Because when you're a cult leader, why not start your own religion, why not build your own town, and then why not run it however you please? That's a On the next True Weird Stuff.

[Max Sweeten]

Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Carla Richardson, Lamar Richardson, Heather Elizabeth, Aaron Cox, Kevin Nash. Kerry, Doc Bowser and Don Morgan. Sherry, when you talked about this and they arrested this William Dolan, I'm guessing that these bizarre attacks, as it were,

[Sherry Lynch]

stopped at that point just like a faucet being turned off. I mean, you still had, you know, by this point, Pascagoula was a boom town and you had, you had a lot of transient people coming in and working on the shipyard. You just had, it was chaotic and you still had break ins. I mean, you know, you still had crime. There was the, you know, vandalism and breaking and entering, but, but the sniffing of the hair of sleeping people that ended abruptly with the arrest of William Dolan.

[Max Sweeten]

Things like this concern me because on the face of it, you go, well, it's strange and quirky, but if you remember, remember the Golden State Killer, he started out, he was in a place called Visalia, if I'm saying that right, and he was the Visalia ransacker. So he'd go in and ransack Holmes and that's kind of, that was his first level in this. And then he got into a Higher level. Until now he's raping and killing. And so it's possible that this was an entry level to something that could happen that would be far more sinister somewhere along the line.

[Sherry Lynch]

And I think if you, if you look at just what we know, right, of this unsolved cold case, there was, there was the, definitely the appearance, if there was a single perpetrator, there was the appearance of escalation. But the escalation was so abrupt. Like we literally went from snipping someone's hair to beating this woman almost to death. I mean, she was so disfigured with a pipe. So there was no in between step. And like, if you, if you look at like FBI profiling and stuff, you know, you can see the gradual escalation, which is why many people don't think that the, the, the attack on the Heidelbergs was the same person who was cutting the hair. Because what are the odds that you had two perpetrators at the same time? I mean, I guess.

[Max Sweeten]

So let's say it was William Dolan. So the attack stopped after he was arrested. So that would point to perhaps that it was him. And then there is all of this bizarre behavior afterwards. Now that doesn't mean that he necessarily was guilty of those crimes, but certainly it does point to some head scratching behavior. Let's put it that way.

[Sherry Lynch]

Dolan, if Dolan is an innocent man, he sure made himself look guilty. He surely did. Now you could say that maybe. Okay, here was. This guy was a big time Hitler fanboy Nazi sympathizer.

[Max Sweeten]

There were a lot of them, by the way.

[Sherry Lynch]

There were a lot of them in this country and there still are. We didn't eradicate them when we should have. And so, you know, here they are. I mean, you gotta, you know, you gotta deal with the problem decisively in the beginning. But okay, so here's what I'm thinking about. William Dolan. He, he lived here, but he was not. He lived in America, but he was not an American. It. And I don't mean that by his citizenship status. I mean his, his ethos was not. He, he wanted the final solution to come to these shores. He was an unapologetic Nazi. He was an unapologetic Hitler sympathizer. So he gets arrested and he goes to Parchment prison. Now I cannot even begin to describe to you how you much you don't want to go to Parchment.

[Max Sweeten]

It's a terrible.

[Sherry Lynch]

At no time did you want to go to Parchment, right? And now, now he's been, he's had his freedom taken away from him by a government that he does not view as worthy. A legitimate thing. He gets out, he's pardoned, and he just can't go back to living, you know, in. In the small town and playing the game anymore. He's so pissed off, he's furious, he's bitter. Prison has changed him. Parchment would do that to anybody. He walks out of his life and basically begins riding the rails and, you know, living by his wits. The fact that he abandoned his family in Mississippi is not proof to me that he's guilty of anything other than being just destroyed by his time at Parchment.

[Max Sweeten]

Can you talk to me about the money? So there were two different money situations here, am I correct? One was a life insurance policy, and another was something from the state because he'd been wrongfully imprisoned. Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

Now his wife couldn't get her hands on any of it.

[Max Sweeten]

On any of it. So it's possible. I mean, I know it's hard to believe anybody would hold a kind of grudge against somebody, that they would not permit them to get money. But is it possible that that was what that was all about, where he was saying, I'm so angry at her for whatever. I will do whatever I can to make sure she doesn't get the. The money?

[Sherry Lynch]

I mean, maybe. Although in her defense, I mean, who knows, right? She. She is in the story, but the. The. At the time, very little attention was paid to her. Maybe she was the most wonderful person ever. Maybe she was a monstrous shrew. But I got to tell you, if my husband walks out of here and fakes his death, better have my money. Because I am going to be wanting. I am going to be wanting to get back at him for that. Putting me through that anguish. So. Want to break here? You want to break here?

[Max Sweeten]

Yeah. No, I have things to talk about. But, yes, we can break here.

[Lisa (Licensed Psychotherapist)]

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[Sherry Lynch]

this one is such a mess. And so, and so baffling because it was never solved to this and it's never going to be solved unless we find a written confession in someone's attic. Max. This is not, not going to be solved. And I think that we did have more than one perpetrator operating in Pascagoula. There were so many break ins. People were opportunistic because of the. And I want to talk about, I want to talk about World War II on American soil because we, we have memory. Hold that in this country. We're not. You and I are history nerds. And I can tell you we were not really taught in school what the war was like for the. When the rationing, the blackouts, all of it. If you were lucky enough to have family that were alive at that time, who would tell you stories about it. How much of that did you learn in school?

[Max Sweeten]

I didn't learn a lot about that. No, I didn't learn about that in school. I mean, I do know that there were German subs off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In fact, they, they killed some British sailors who were out there. Those British sailors are buried out on Ocracoke. Now. I do know that. And that is from World War II. Then the Japanese, of course, we talked about this before, sent the balloon bombs over that went all over the place. And they're still finding the balloon bombs all these years later.

[Archive/Newscaster]

So

[Max Sweeten]

there was a sense of a threat. It's not like there was an army at the Canadian border that was going to come get us. But there was the idea that there was sabotaging things. There were Germans who were dropped off in New York who ended up getting caught, but they were there to sabotage the shipyards. So there was a sense of we were not protected just because we were far away from what looked like the main action. There was an idea that we were at war. And the other part of it was too. You're talking about a country that had just come out of the Great Depression where people were just eking out a living. Now they're being asked to make sacrifices for the greater good with these coupon books where you could get the rationing with gas and sugar and meat and

[Sherry Lynch]

all that other stuff, it was. Sometimes I think that we don't really teach that part of our own history because it argues for collectivism, people banding together for the greater good. And at this moment in our culture, we're anti collectivists, we're very pro individual. Like, I'm gonna do it my way and I don't care if that hurts you. Right. Very liberty libertarian oriented as opposed to. Well, I'm gonna make all of these sacrifices for, so that, you know, for the cause of freedom and democracy. We're not really, do you agree? We're not really about that.

[Max Sweeten]

No, I don't think anymore.

[Sherry Lynch]

And so I think that there's been a lot of like, just whatever, but there's also been a lot of intentional choices made in terms of what version of the American story we tell.

[Max Sweeten]

The only time we've had an inkling of that in our lifetime was right after 9, 11. There was a sense of that, there was a sense of let's pull together right after that. It didn't last terribly long. I remember we were, we were all like, wow, this is really going to change things. And then shortly after was like, no, it hasn't changed anything.

[Sherry Lynch]

But if you remember that feeling of all being in it together, how that, that was like medicine for people's souls, how good that felt to feel like we were all in it together. And you know, the powers that be don't want us to feel that way because then we might turn our attention to them and go, listen up, you cockroaches. Right? So it's important to keep divided and furious and suspicious and fearful of each other. In many ways, the, the vibe in Pascagoula in The summer of 1942 is a micro version of the vibe of the United States in 2026, where these are foreigners, these are strangers, these are not real Americans. They're coming here to take our jobs and undermine our way of life. Tell me what, tell me how that doesn't sound familiar. Okay, so the, what we had in Pascagoula that summer was because of the blackouts and the extreme paranoia and security around the Ingalls shipyard, which you can read about it, it's a very, very important piece in the American war effort. The people of Pascagoula, you know, contributed mightily to the Allied victory in World War II. But anyway, the blackouts created an environment that was perfect for opportunistic, you know, low rent criminals.

[Max Sweeten]

Right?

[Sherry Lynch]

Because a blackout is not the same thing as people turn their lights off and it's Bedtime, Everything was just submerged in darkness. You were not allowed out on the street. And people were scared while they were in blackout. They believed that they were in blackout because there was a potential of an enemy bomber going overhead. Right, right. So you weren't just sitting in the dark being patriotic, you were scared. Now, criminals, people that don't give a shit about any of that, what did a. What was a blackout other than a chance to nip over and break into someone's house? There was a lot of opportunistic petty crime. And you know what? My guess is we're talking about Pascagoula, but my guess is that was true everywhere. There would be a blackout because people are people.

[Archive/Newscaster]

Right?

[Sherry Lynch]

So I think you had multiple perpetrators in Pascagoula. I don't think one individual was responsible for all of that mayhem. And I think it's possible that the hair cutter and the pipe attack, two completely different people. Because the fingerprints didn't match, remember?

[Max Sweeten]

Right.

[Sherry Lynch]

Fingerprints didn't match. They got Dolan for the pipe attack, but the fingerprints at the Heidelberg crime scene didn't match any of the other crime scenes. That tells me we have two completely separate perpetrators. And it's possible that after Dolan was arrested, the person who was the actual phantom barber realized that God had given him a freebie, a free pass. And you best take it. You best find another way to scratch this itch.

[Max Sweeten]

And it seems like. So some were saying that it was some sort of, I don't know, terrorism against the people that were working there as an anti. As an anti war thing that they were doing.

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah, that was one theory.

[Max Sweeten]

That theory doesn't hold much water, does it? If you're thinking, how are we going to terrorize this community? Hey, let's cut the hair of people in the middle of the night. That's not what I would do. I'd be setting up charges and explosives and that sort of thing, you know.

[Sherry Lynch]

No, I'm with you. But you have to, like. You have to under, like, put yourself back. I mean, Operation Bat Bomb. And that wasn't. That's just like one of the crazy cuckoo things. There's a lot of them, you know, it seemed. And we today, as modern people, we have of vocabulary and an understanding and a way to talk about things like trichophilia that. That our ancestors did not.

[Max Sweeten]

Right.

[Sherry Lynch]

You know, we. We have a. We. We're more, you know, thanks to people being more open about mental health and, you know, we're. We're more comfortable talking about these kinds of things. I can only imagine what a poor trichophiliac hair fetishist and Pascagoulo did back in the day. And they did find. So I. They did find a bag of hair along some train tracks near the very dilapidated shack that Dolan and his wife lived in. But that does not mean that Dolan put that hair there. If I find evidence of a crime in the parking lot next to where you live, Max, can I. Is it really like a given that you put it there? No. So we have different. Like we have a whole different. We're more sophisticated about criminal forensics and all of that now than the people were back then.

[Max Sweeten]

And I also think you alluded to this during the narration. There's the thrill of the control of the situation. And the hair is a trophy from the fact that you had that control in that moment. And I suspect that that's what the hair was all about. It might not even been about the hair. It was about the trophy that they could take.

[Sherry Lynch]

I think it was as much about the vulnerable sleeping child as it was about the hair. I'm with you. This is why I think, and we can, since it's an unsolved case, we get to. We get to have our own theory. I think we had two distinct perpetrators. I think it's possible that the pipe beating perpetrator was involved in some of the other burglaries, maybe. I think we have two separate perpetrators. I think we have one person whose motivation is deeply psychosexual and the other person is violent, is, you know, just a violent person. And I think it's two different things because when we look at. So the, the hair fan, the phantom burglar breaks into the Our lady of Victory's convent. If you have a psychosexual fixation on the hair of little girls, the purity of little girls living in a conventional. Can you even control your excitement?

[Max Sweeten]

Yeah, yeah, I can see where that would be. Would play a part in it. I certainly could see that.

[Sherry Lynch]

And then think about the incident where police believe that the phantom barber didn't even enter the home. He just cut through the window, reached in and cut her hair. This is someone that just gets off on touching sleeping people and taking the souvenir. I, I don't know, like, not to be an amateur FBI profiler, although, what else are we?

[Max Sweeten]

What else are we at this moment?

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah, I know not to be an amateur profiler, but when I look at the individual who is just. He just wants to kneel by your bed while you're sleeping, vulnerable and helpless. And take a little bit of your hair. That doesn't seem like the same guy as the one that went into the Heidelberg house.

[Max Sweeten]

Yeah, probably not. I mean, it seemed like different things were going on with the two of those situations.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, I'll tell you what else I think. I think that whoever showed up at Brodus's house, the. The father of the cop, I think that was Pipeman. Because ain't no sleeping ladies or little girls in the Broadus house. And not one of the victims of the phantom barber were men.

[Max Sweeten]

And he would not have gone to a house unless he was sure that. I'm sure he would have done some reconnaissance on where is the best place to go to be able to find his victims.

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah, you're not going to Brodus's house. You've got an. You got an older man who lives with his unmarried son. There's no. Ain't nobody there whose hair you're gonna want to touch. I think Pipe guy might be the same guy, because there the. Even though he didn't succeed in getting into the Brodus home, the attempt was much more violent and much more. Less covert, I guess, than what the Anna Barber did.

[Max Sweeten]

So let's talk about William Dolan again for a moment. The governor. Was it the governor that gave him the pardon? It was the governor that gave him the full pardon.

[Sherry Lynch]

The governor of Mississippi.

[Max Sweeten]

So they decided to give him a pardon. So I'm wondering, what kind of demeanor did he have as a person? What kind of a guy was he? Because I have to think that however he acted, once he got to prison, all of that stuff led somebody to believe, you know, maybe we should pardon this guy, we should let him go.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, the descriptions of William Dolan are so much of their time, because by the time he was arrested, he wasn't a well liked guy. And that, by the way, if you're. If you're wondering why you don't have any friends, is it perhaps because you're yelling at people about how great Hitler is. That is going to be. That's going to make it harder to make a problem.

[Max Sweeten]

Yeah. During World War II, while we're at war with Germany.

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah. So all of the descriptions of Dolan are really negative. A sour, angry German, you know, red faced rage, you know, yelling about Hitler. He hates America. So who knows what this man was actually like? He didn't get the benefit of the doubt.

[Max Sweeten]

Okay, so he, he was the. Yeah, so he was yelling at people about this. I just.

[Sherry Lynch]

That's what they say. You just don't know.

[Max Sweeten]

Usually when a court. Usually when a court convicts you, they. They throw away the key. So somebody must have been fighting on his behalf in order to make this happen.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, there was no getting around the fact that the fingerprints like that.

[Max Sweeten]

That's true, but. But, you know, but still, nonetheless, somebody had to be fighting on his behalf in order to make that happen. They didn't have the, you know, the Innocence Project, the Mississippi Innocence Project wasn't around yet.

[Sherry Lynch]

I think it might have been so glaring that somebody was getting railroaded here. There were a couple of things that happened. Like the biggest evidence against him was that the attacks ceased after he was arrested. Now, today, you would not be able to get a conviction based on that. You just. You couldn't. No, but it's a different time.

[Max Sweeten]

The Golden State Killer. The Golden State Killer merely aged out of it. People always say they stop until they're caught or killed. Well, no, sometimes they age out of it, too.

[Sherry Lynch]

Just get too old, you know, that the bursitis is acting up, it's harder to swing the ax. So that went against him, that the, the incidents immediately and abruptly stopped. But we had, I think that we were looking at two separate situations. I think we were looking at an opportunistic breaking and entering crime wave and the sexual fetish with the trichophilia. And then in there somewhere, we had this brutal attack with a pipe. So here's the motive for that. According to the prosecution and the police, Dolan had had an unpleasant encounter with Mr. Heidelberg's father, who happened to be a judge. That's it. That was the motive for this violent attack that left this woman absolutely disfigured.

[Max Sweeten]

It seems pretty thin. I mean, it really does.

[Sherry Lynch]

You'd have a hard time today making a case on something so flimsy.

[Max Sweeten]

I think there's a lot of cases where you don't even have to have motive as long as you have evidence. And they had neither. I mean, they had some, some motive maybe, but they didn't really have evidence against him. Right.

[Sherry Lynch]

It was a thin motive. And then, you know, they found the bag of hair. But the, the hair was not in his possession. No, the hair was found alongside the railroad tracks on a path in the woods. Anybody could have put. The cops could have put it there. I mean, anybody could have put it there. So that again, you know, like, our system is flawed, but you, you still wouldn't want to be in a different system because at least, like now and all of our true crime maniacs know that you got to really Work to put somebody away on no evidence. So it's harder to do now than it was back then. And the thing that Dolan had going against him, his German accent, his Nazi sympathies, and the fact that Pascagoula was so critical to the war effort, everything went against him. He was guilty of something. At minimum, he was guilty of being German, and they were going to get him.

[Max Sweeten]

Is it possible that the perpetrator of this crime had a relative who was a hairdresser? Because one thing that I thought about with all of these was somebody's gonna have to clean. Somebody's gonna have to make these people look presentable in public with their hair.

[Sherry Lynch]

Oh, wouldn't that be funny? I mean, wouldn't that be funny if this was someone that was just trying to drum up business for the barber shop?

[Max Sweeten]

Now, I guess children a lot got their hair cut at home, but for adults, any adults involved with it, you

[Sherry Lynch]

know, I think it's entirely possible that a person. So this individual. Our theory of the cases is that they had trichophilia, a psychosexual obsession with hair. Now, how they derive pleasure, we don't know, but we know that there was a vulnerable sleeping component to it. We know that the preference was for children and women. And he liked light colored hair. So this is what we know. We know that that can escalate and become violent, but it doesn't usually, if you look at the data on fetish behavior, very seldom jumps that line. You know, people can go their whole life being so turned on by somebody's hair and never behave violently. Yeah, so that's why I say the escalation seems abrupt. Like, I'm gonna get your hair, and I'm gonna get your hair, and I'm gonna get your hair. I'm gonna beat you half to death with a pipe. Like we skipped a bunch of steps. Like there's a missing link.

[Max Sweeten]

And this is kind of like. That'd be kind of like if you. If. If. Let's just say you found men who were. Had hairy chests, that you found that attractive, then that's one thing. But what's going on here is almost. It's. It's almost like a rape of some kind. Do you know what I mean? I don't mean to minimize rape, but you see what I'm saying, The violation. The violation is such that it is. It's troubling.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, whoever this individual was, their. Their trichophilia had escalated to the point of breaking into the homes of people who were sleeping to Steal their hair. So let me be clear there. There was obvious escalation. It's just there seems to be a big missing step between. I'm going to break in and cut your hair. I'm going to break in and beat you in the face with a pipe. There's something missing in between those two things for me. But, yeah, there. I mean, there's a clear. We did an episode, remember we did a foot fetish episode on True Weird Stuff. We did that, right? I did. Okay. The foot. The foot fetish is the most common fetish. It is, absolutely. And it takes a million different shapes and forms. Have you ever heard of a foot fetishist who escalated to the point where he had to kill you and cut your foot off, take it home?

[Max Sweeten]

No, I've never heard that. No.

[Sherry Lynch]

So it's rare. Like a lot of people. There are people listening right now who have a fetish, and I want them to feel very safe and welcome because it's so rare that these things you do. You. Everyone's consenting. You're not hurting yourself or anybody else. Absolutely none of our business. In this case, there was. It did escalate to breaking and entering. Okay. That. You can't. There's no getting around that. And where might it have gone? Right? Where would we eventually want to curl up in bed next to the sleeping child? Would then we need more and more and more to achieve that satisfaction? Who knows? Who knows? And good with it? We don't know because it stopped when it did.

[Max Sweeten]

If it was just about getting hair, then you just. You'd go to the barber shop in their dumpster after hours and get the hair, you know?

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah, it was a specific. The sleeping victim, I think, was as much a part of this as the hair. In fact, Max, it's possible that the sleeping victim was the fetish and the hair was the souvenir.

[Max Sweeten]

That. That would. That would almost make more sense to me.

[Sherry Lynch]

So now let's go with that. Right. The fetish is for the sleeping, vulnerable, helpless. What is. How is a victim more helpless than when they're asleep and unaware that you're even there? I mean, you have a power. It's like being a God. Right. But how do we get from that to beating Mrs. Heidelberg. Lillian Heidelberg, in the face of the pipe with not. No step in between?

[Max Sweeten]

The only thing that I would say is the Golden State Killer accelerated.

[Sherry Lynch]

However,

[Max Sweeten]

I don't see the line as clearly with this as I did with that one.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, didn't. Didn't he go from breaking and Entering assault, rape into murder. Didn't it follow like a linear went.

[Max Sweeten]

That's how linear started. Yeah, he, he went in, he was the ransacker. The facility at Ransack, or you go in and ransack and he would take some trophies from that. He wasn't necessarily a burglar. He was getting some sort of weird satisfaction out of that. And then it escalated to the next thing where he's going in and he's doing assaults and then he has his victims, he doesn't kill his victims. And then it's the next level where he is going in the assaults and then he's killing the victims afterwards. Not only that, he loved. He was so twisted. If he didn't kill them, he would get their phone number and he would call them and torment them after we had caller id, obviously.

[Sherry Lynch]

So. But you can see like he followed a more logical.

[Max Sweeten]

Doesn't follow with this. It does escalation. That's why I go back to saying you're probably right about that, that it's two different people. And given the situation, you know, that if we were to face this sort of thing today, that people would take advantage of it all over the place. So you, I mean, with 15,000 people living there, was that what it was during the war? With 15,000 people, you're sure to find some people in there that are going to want to take advantage of the situation at the blackout.

[Sherry Lynch]

Why not? The entire town is plunged in an inky darkness and no one's on the street. Who's going to see you break a window at the gas station and empty the register? You know, it was that kind of like there was this. And probably in other parts of the US there were similar things. We just focused on Pascagoula. So I think it's a fair question to say, okay, if you guys are right and there were two separate perpetrators and William Dolan wasn't guilty of any of this. He just was the wrong Hitler sympathizer in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then why did it stop? So the pipe beating incident on the Heidelbergs, I think that was a separate perpetrator, a violent. The kind of burglar that breaks in and commits violence. And I, I would invite you to dive into the local law enforcement records and newspaper archives and you'll find other people who got their homes broken into and got their faces punched. That is a more regular, garden variety sort of criminal. Why did the hair fandom stop? I think it's possible, even though it's unlikely, because human beings, we don't seem capable of learning from other people's mistakes. Stakes. But is it possible that in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in August 1942, there was an individual with a. God help me, unholy obsession on the sweet, unspoiled innocence of a sleeping child. And it was all this man could think about. It was all he could do to restrain himself. But he saw what happened when they arrested William Dolan. And he looked hot to the skies and said, message received. God, I'll never do it again. And didn't.

[Max Sweeten]

And. And that is possible.

[Sherry Lynch]

It's rare, I think, but is it possible? Is it possible?

[Max Sweeten]

If, if there was some element to this where he was taunting the police? I would say, no, it's not possible. But there seems to be. No, there's none of that, look at me kind of behavior that a lot of these serial killers love to have. There seems to be none of that. So that's why I'll go with you on that. Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

And so when I thought about it, okay, let's say that the pipe beating person just continued their life of crime until they met with an unfortunate end, as is often the case for those folks. And William Dolan is just a Nazi who got pissed off at the way life treated him and abandoned his wife. Ain't nothing all that shocking about that, right? The phantom barber, though, he realized he was not a professional criminal. He was a person in the grip of a consuming obsession. And he realized that the chances of continuing to get away with it were close to zero. So he stopped and he had the hair that he had, or not, depending on that bag of hair that they found in the woods that may have been. That may have been planted. Okay, yeah, we don't know that because we need it. And arrest. We needed an arrest.

[Max Sweeten]

And there was a bloody glove nearby.

[Sherry Lynch]

And so I imagined that gentleman, because that's a man. We know it's a man, right? That gentleman living out the rest of his days in Mississippi with a secret. But you can't live forever and somebody eventually has to empty out your house. But they'll never know. I mean, I found emptying my grandparents house. I found a bag of hair. Of course I did. They saved the. They. When they cut the baby's hair, there was little curls.

[Max Sweeten]

I have a baby book somewhere with my hair in it.

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah, A lot of families have a bag of hair floating around Meemaw's attic. And so I just tried to imagine going through this person's stuff and there's always something that you can't explain something you'd rather not know, the backstory, you know, and maybe this person, the Phantom barber, took that secret to the grave.

[Max Sweeten]

I think that there is. This is one of these things, of course, when we're never going to find out. But William Dolan was a twisted guy. Phantom barber or not. He was a twisted guy.

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah, he was. But see, that's the. That's the problem with a guy like William Dolan, because you can look at, like, this guy's an asshole and he's a Nazi. Like, all bets are off. He's an actual. Look at him. Look at him. He loves Adolf Hitler. He's a terrible person. And so it's easier to attribute terrible behaviors to people we think are terrible.

[Max Sweeten]

Right.

[Sherry Lynch]

And that's why charming silver tongue psychopaths have an easier time getting away with it, because we just don't want to believe that this wonderful person is capable of something terrible. But if we think you're a dick, you have no trouble believing you're capable of something terrible. I think that. I think William Dolan might have gotten caught in the dick factor effect. So for me, the big. There's a big piece of this that it. It's unsolved.

[Max Sweeten]

It never.

[Sherry Lynch]

It's this thing that happened. It's this thing that happened. The entire town was in a fever for the summer of 1942, and then it just ended and it went away. And we'd have a lot of these kind of cases in America, don't we, where the whole town. The whole town. Look at the Texarkana Phantom Killer.

[Max Sweeten]

Oh, yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

The whole town is afraid to go to bed at night, and then it's just over, and there's no answers and no. No justice. Maybe the people of Pascagoula thought that William Dolan was the culprit, and they didn't like the fact that the governor pardoned him, but, you know, they accepted that he was guilty. Whereas I think the governor of Mississippi knows or knew, because, of course, he's dead. I think Governor Fielding Wright knew they never got the guy and they'd gotten the wrong guy.

[Max Sweeten]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

And once upon a time, we did elect people to hold public office who had strong moral convictions. Things like, we shouldn't send innocent people to Parchment prisoners. We should right that wrong. And that was the governor of Mississippi at that time. He saw a wrong that he and his successor agreed with him. Which tells you that there was a case there, Max, because Wright left office, and the one that came in after him was like, you know what? We need to pardon this man. What does that tell you?

[Max Sweeten]

It tells me that whoever was the perpetrator was working there, did really important work. And they said, we'll move him somewhere else. And when the information came to the governor and went, by the way, this is the guy who did it, but we needed him over here to take care of this. Whatever had to do with the war effort. And that's eventually. Is how this other guy, William Dolan,

[Sherry Lynch]

got released and the governor. And you know what? It's to the credit I don't know anything about Fielding Wright, the governor of Mississippi of the. Of the time. And if I probably shouldn't dig into him, because I'll find out he used to eat puppies on crackers or whatever, but he could not live with what seemed to him a terrible wrong, a terrible miscarriage of justice. That is a moraled and principled stand. It would have been easy for him as a politician to do nothing. Like, what does he care about some random Hitler sympathizer? Why does that. Why, why. Why look out for that individual? A lot of people wouldn't, but he did. And that. I think there's. I think that tells us something important about this case. Not sure exactly what, but I. I believe that William Dolan was not the perpetrator of any of these crimes. What do you think?

[Max Sweeten]

No, I don't think so. I don't. I. I don't. I don't think so. Just because you're an oddball or you look good for it doesn't mean you did it.

[Sherry Lynch]

And I think he's terrible. I have no. Like, as soon as you tell me I'm. I'm really into Hitler. We have no basis for friendship. I do not have any warm feeling for this man, but that doesn't make him guilty. And I do think that whoever the phantom Barber was. God bless. I can't imagine how hard it is to live in the grip of such an obsession that you have to cut a screen and go into a convent to touch a little girl's head. Please get help. If that's you, please get help. All right, that's that for this episode.

[Max Sweeten]

Somebody listen to this. I'm getting good. I heard Merchant Cherry on True Weird Stuff Podcast, and I'm getting hopeful for my problem now.

[Sherry Lynch]

Yeah, I mean, I. Listen, I'm. I'm all for. Like, it makes pe. It makes the world interesting. I mean, I don't know where some of these fixations and fetishes come from, but absolutely. If you're not hurting anybody, I don't care. Ain't none of my business. Ain't none of my business. But the minute I have to say to you, the minute that you prop a wheelbarrow next to a window and stand on it and cut the screen and climb inside and tiptoe upstairs and kneel next to the bed of a sleeping 6 year old child with a pair of haircut scissors, I need you to hear me. You need to get some help.

[Max Sweeten]

You do.

[Sherry Lynch]

Not because you like hair, but because you just broke into someone's house and you're crouched by their sleeping child. And that is a sign that you might want to talk to somebody. Or at least download the Calm app and see if you can't distract yourself in some formal fashion. All right, well, we leave another cold case unsolved, even though Max and I are pretty convinced we think we know who didn't do it.

[Max Sweeten]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

If not, who did? Thank you so much for listening to true weird stuff. This. We love making this show and we do. If it wasn't for you. If it wasn't for you, it would be an act of extreme masochism and we would also need to maybe get help. So thank you for listening to it. Oh, hey, we're back with a P.S. because Max did some digging on the governor of Mississippi, Fielding. Right. Who pardoned William Dolan and. And set up the opportunity for the state to give him reparations for being unjustly imprisoned. Take it away, Max.

[Max Sweeten]

Well, he was an avowed racist. He ran. Well, that might explain it then from Thurman on. President, he fought with Truman against the whole civil rights thing. So he certainly might have been more sympathetic to somebody like William Dolan, who was, you know, a Nazi supporter. Oh, a lot of those. Kk. He was a supporter of KKK people, too. A lot of those KKK people. And they. And the Nazis don't like. Yeah, they don't like each other.

[Sherry Lynch]

And yet a lot of them are fellow travelers. You know, there was the American Nazi part. Like, I would, you know, if I. If I was in a hurry to get taken away in the unmarked van, we would do an episode on the American Nazi Party on the kk. Kk. But, yeah, that never went away. So I think I'd rather not at this point. We. Perhaps we will, but not today. Yes. So that would explain why Dolan was pardoned. I still don't think he was the phantom barber. I just don't.

[Max Sweeten]

I don't. I think this. There is a lot more to that part of this story that we don't know.

[Sherry Lynch]

Well, at least none of the people whose haircuts were butchered were harmed. Right?

[Max Sweeten]

Right.

[Sherry Lynch]

At least the phantom barber didn't get a chance to escalate into, you know, hair violence. Because having someone, having a stranger crouched next to your bed with sharp scissors while you sleep, that. That could end differently than it did.

[Max Sweeten]

Yeah.

[Sherry Lynch]

Okay, so that's the postscript fielding, right? Unrepentant racist who did a solid for a Hitler fanboy.

[Lisa (Licensed Psychotherapist)]

Woohoo.

[Max Sweeten]

Okay, that's it.

[Sherry Lynch]

See you next time.

[Max Sweeten]

And if you listen to us on Apple Podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff.

[Sherry Lynch]

Hit our website trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you@True

[Max Sweeten]

WeirdStuff.com and follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram.

[Sherry Lynch]

True Weird Stuff is in NOW Media Production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sherry lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Carrie Bowser. Additional production by the Mysterious is Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Fur. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axelin. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and zayn Nash.

[Max Sweeten]

Copyright 2026 Now Media.

[Sherry Lynch]

All rights reserved. All wrongs Remember,

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[Max Sweeten]

Where's that dang paper boy?

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[Max Sweeten]

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