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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the identity of the Phantom Barber was never established.

Timeline of Events

1938: Ingalls Shipbuilding is established along the Pascagoula River.

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

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

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

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

bed by the window.

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

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

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

1942: Dolan is convicted and sentenced to ten years.

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

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

Hugh White.

Historical Significance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

Mississippi Encyclopedia

Newspapers.com archives of 1942 Pascagoula and Jackson County coverage

National Park Service records on Gulf Coast wartime industry

Contemporary Ingalls Shipbuilding employment records

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

tried to file away quietly.

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

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

mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 210 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters

On October 8, 1871, a wall of flame moving faster than a galloping horse descended on Peshtigo, Wisconsin,

a lumber town built entirely of wood. Wooden sidewalks, wooden bridges, sawdust-packed roads, and heaps of

bark and mill waste surrounded a population of two thousand people, nearly all of them employed by William

Butler Ogden's woodenware factory, the largest in the country. That night a firestorm driven by gale-force

winds consumed the town in about an hour. Superheated gases ignited buildings before the flames arrived.

Sand fused into glass. People's clothing caught fire as they ran.

The river offered the best chance of survival, though people died there too, and a few survived elsewhere.

Father Peter Pernin, a French-born Catholic priest, pushed a wagon carrying the church's sacred vessels

into the river and stood chest-deep in the water for hours while the town burned around him. His 1874

account, The Finger of God Is There, remains the most detailed firsthand narrative of the disaster.

Timeline of Events

Summer 1871: A severe drought grips the upper Midwest and small brush fires burn unchecked for weeks across

northeastern Wisconsin.

October 8, 1871, morning: The wind shifts to the southwest and accelerates. Scattered fires begin merging

across the region.

October 8, 1871, 10:00 PM: The firestorm strikes Peshtigo and destroys the entire town within minutes.

October 9, 1871, dawn: Peshtigo has ceased to exist. Every building is gone. Surrounding settlements

including Sugar Bush are devastated as well.

1874: Father Peter Pernin publishes his eyewitness account, preserving the most complete record of the

fire.

Historical Significance

The Peshtigo fire killed between 1,200 and 2,500 people in a single night, making it the deadliest fire

in American history. The exact toll will never be known, because entire families were erased with nobody

left to report them missing. A mass grave in the Peshtigo Fire Cemetery holds 350 unidentified men, women,

and children. The disaster still received almost no national attention. The telegraph lines through the

region had burned, and by the time word reached the outside world the Great Chicago Fire, which started

the same night and killed roughly 300 people, had taken the country's headlines and national attention.

Frances Fairchild of Wisconsin had already traveled to Chicago with aid and had to redirect some of it

north once the scale of the Peshtigo catastrophe became clear. In Peshtigo itself, the fire is remembered

as the disaster the rest of the country forgot., though real fire prevention policy took decades to arrive.

Today the Peshtigo Fire Museum preserves artifacts from that night, and the memory has been kept alive less

by national recognition than by the families who rebuilt on burned ground and refused to let their dead be

forgotten.

Sources

Father Peter Pernin, The Finger of God Is There, 1874

Peshtigo Fire Museum and Peshtigo Fire Cemetery records

Wisconsin Historical Society accounts of the October 1871 firestorm

If you liked this: Episode 202, Gainesville, Georgia. Another town erased in minutes by something nobody

saw coming.

In mid-November 1934, a twenty-year-old artist named Everett Ruess led two burros into the canyon country south of Escalante, Utah. He carried journals, watercolors, and enough provisions for two months. He had spent four years wandering the desert Southwest alone, painting, writing letters that read like poetry, and meeting artists like Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange along the way. He shared a last camp with two sheepherders, who offered him mutton; he said he had plenty. He never came back.

In March 1935, a search party found his two burros penned behind a brush fence, healthy in Davis Gulch, a side canyon off the Escalante River. His camp was strangely incomplete: bedroll, cookware, paintings, and journals all missing. Carved into the rock wall above it was a single word and a year: NEMO 1934. Nemo is Latin for nobody. No body was ever found, and no conclusive evidence of what happened has ever surfaced. The desert simply closed behind him. In the ninety years since, Everett Ruess has become the patron saint of wanderers, of people who felt the pull of wild country so strongly they followed it past the point of return. His fate remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the American West.

Timeline of Events

March 28, 1914: Everett Ruess is born in Oakland, California, to Christopher and Stella Ruess.

Summer 1930: At sixteen he takes his first solo wilderness trip in the Sierra Nevada and comes home changed.

1931 to 1934: He makes four extended solo journeys through the desert Southwest and meets Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Maynard Dixon.

Mid-November 1934: He writes his last letter to his brother Waldo from Escalante, Utah, telling him he has not tired of the wilderness.

Mid-November 1934: A sheepherder is the last person to see him, heading into canyon country east of Escalante.

March 1935: A search party finds the burros, the camping gear, and NEMO 1934 carved in Davis Gulch. Everett is declared lost and presumed dead.

2009: DNA testing of remains found at Comb Ridge proves they are not Everett Ruess.

Historical Significance

Everett Ruess occupies a singular place in the literature and mythology of the American West. His letters and journals, published after his disappearance in On Desert Trails in 1940, influenced a generation of wilderness writers including Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Jon Krakauer. The NEMO inscription in Davis Gulch became an icon of the vanishing impulse, the idea that a person could walk into wild country and become part of it. The 2009 DNA investigation, which proved the bones found at Comb Ridge were not his, brought national attention back to the case and confirmed the mystery is still open. Davis Gulch itself was flooded by Lake Powell after Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963. The ground where Everett was last seen no longer exists above water.

Sources

Ruess family letters, published in On Desert Trails, 1940

David Roberts, Finding Everett Ruess, 2011

Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory findings, 2009

If you liked this: Episode 185, Taos, New Mexico. Another Southwest mystery where the desert kept the answer.

Hometown History explores forgotten stories from small-town America. The overlooked events, hidden triumphs, and buried tragedies that shaped the country we live in. New episodes every Tuesday. Find every episode at mythsandmalice.com/hometown-history

Episode 208 | Hometown History | Hosted by Shane Waters