Campfire Tales

Draw closer, where the dying fire throws dancing shadows and the night feels just a step too close. Tonight, we speak of scissors whispered against the stillness and a shadow that haunted the summers of 1942. We speak of the Phantom Barber.

Pascagoula, Mississippi, a town alive with wartime shipyards and the hum of cicadas, never expected its peaceful nights to unravel into fear. It didn’t happen all at once. The first cut came with no sound, no warning. Locks of hair gone, shorn in the dark, stolen from the unsuspecting heads of girls who woke with more questions than answers. These were not pranks. Not mischief. These were calculated intrusions into sanctuaries that should have been inviolate.

The tale begins at the Convent of Our Lady of Victories, a refuge of faith that the creeping tendrils of dread would soon pierce. On June 5, Mary Evelyn Briggs and Edna Marie Hydel stirred in their shared room. The night was heavy, wrapped in the humid blanket of a Mississippi summer. A faint noise pulled them from sleep. Maybe it was a creak of the floorboards, perhaps it was the faint rush of breath as someone moved. The sound was enough. Startled, they sat up, just in time to see the outline of a man slipping through their window and vanishing like smoke into the night.

Morning revealed the violation in stark clarity. Locks of their hair had been cut and taken, strange trophies for a faceless phantom. The police came, bloodhounds tracing his scent into the woods, but the trail ended there. It was as if the woods themselves had swallowed him whole.

Fear spread like wildfire through the town, and it wasn’t long before the shadow touched another life. Carol Peattie, just six years old, became the next victim. Her family awoke to the discovery of her hair missing, cruelly severed in the dead of night. Her bedroom window screen had been sliced clean through, the only sign of the intruder who moved with a surgeon’s precision. Her small body, still in repose, hadn’t stirred.

And still, the Barber kept his motives wrapped in shadow. No valuables were stolen. No screams pierced the night. Just the quiet horror of knowing that someone had been in the room, lingering close enough to touch.

Why hair? Why these girls? The questions gnawed at Pascagoula.

For a time, the Barber stayed within this macabre ritual. But then, on June 13th, the silence shattered. At the Heidelberg home, the specter’s work turned violent. Terrell Heidelberg and his wife were attacked as they slept. Not scissors this time, but a lead pipe wielded with vicious intent. Terrell lost teeth in the assault, his blood staining sheets that should have been untouched by such savagery. The Barber hadn’t taken hair that night. He had almost taken a life.

The town came undone. Nightlights glowed dimly in bedrooms. Windows that once invited the summer breeze were barred and bolted. Each thud of footsteps on the street sent hearts racing. But the Barber remained a ghost, his secret name unspoken, his movements beyond logic.

Months of growing hysteria led to an arrest. William Dolan, a local chemist with a grudge against the Heidelbergs, was taken into custody. Locks of hair were found near his home, flimsy evidence to frame him as the shadow that had stalked the town. The people of Pascagoula, desperate for release from their fear, clung to the arrest like a lifeline. Yet suspicions lingered. Could he truly be the one? Dolan maintained his innocence. The courts convicted him of attempted murder in the Heidelberg attack, but to this day, the scars of the Phantom Barber’s reign remain unanswered.

Some say the crimes were a manifestation of wartime paranoia, blown out of proportion. Others whisper that the Barber vanished into history, his scissors tucked away with his secrets. A few, the ones who sit close to fires like these, claim the shadow never left Pascagoula but merely waits.

Even now, on nights like this, when the sounds of the world grow soft and the dark feels too heavy, one might wonder. If the night stirs, if you feel the faintest tug at your hair or hear the brief, metallic whisper of scissors closing somewhere behind you, don’t look. Don’t move.

Not everything born in shadow is content to stay forgotten. Stay close to the fire.