The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 59

1 nnn eaisme Strange Exploits Phantom Barber A 0 iii 8 iatu ti nnn 'f (' 11 6 1 1(5 ii Star" Not Even lie Dloodhounds Can Track the Shadovy Prowler, Who, Like the Famous Kiss Bandit and the Toe-Ticlding Durglar, Has a Gift for Stealth and Uses If to SnatchtheTresscsof Doom-Town Victims i i V' I 1 -p-v 1 1 A Amm wimm AL 1 v7 I Hj I I V- -i I 'yw I r-Hr I I -4: i A A Sill i i i' i lJj LiiUS lU i A'lr. it A.A I Wrenched Suddenly Out of Sleep by the Feci of Finrjers in Her Hair, Mary Evelyn Beheld a Waking Nightmare, the Ugly Face of the Phantom Barber. 1 A Vx A X''X, 1 1 Where Blond Ringlets Once Fell, None Fall Today, A Little Laura Brlggs (Right) Curiously Convinces Herself By Touching the Head of Her Sister, Mary Evelyn. IN HER dream she was riding her bicycle down hill very fct The wind was tugging at her hair. It felt as thoueh the wind had 'j A 1 -A' 7 A s4Ma.X uaatWi iS Vt ij.

snipped off one of her locks. A rainstorm prevented the bloodhounds from going into action. And that completes the list of the hair hi-jacker's escapades at this writing. When and if he is captured, it should be interesting to compare in the flesh, with his two outstanding predecessors in bizarre burglary. Of these, Joseph (Tickle-toe) Peroz, a romantic gentleman originally of Puerto Rico, later of New York, was the first.

Haphazardly 1 i ing fire escapes one Spring evening a few years ago, Mr. Peroz glanced through an open window and perceived a ravishing sight It was Miss Marion Cribbs, a 26-year-old nurse, sound asleep. What with the Spring and all, Mr. Peroz could not resist the temptation to step into the room and tickle the nurse's exposed foot with the corner of the bedsheet. When she woke ud.

he ing on Mondays and Fridays, arouiij midnight. Thus, on the Friday following the Monday when he I had raided the con- I vent of Our Lady of I Victories, he struck again, this time at the home of David 1 G. Peattie on one of the town's principal residential streets. Ij Mrs. Peattie was fc, in the hospital at the time, a Mrs.

Walter a and her husband be The 6-lear-Old IYattie Twins, David (Lft) and Carol. Before the Barber's Visit Carol's Hair Fell to Her Shoulders; Now It Is Almost As Short As Her Brother's. fingers that really touched and pulled. A moment later the darkness of the room swirled before her eyes and she knew she was in her bed In the convent dormitory. She recognized the room but thought she was still asleep, for there was something strange hanging over her, a grayish blur surmounted by a smaller blur, as though there were not quite enough darkness to fill the room and these void gray spaces had been left.

Then all at once the spaces became solid and she was wide awake, staring into a man's face. Terror surged into her throat and was throttled there before it could escape In a scream. The man had moved. His finger was at his lips. He was whispering.

She tried to make out what he was saying, but his blurred face and the larger blur that was the upper part of his body swam out of sight, and then the bare room, with its four beds, her own and those of her sister, Laura, the other little girl and Sister Camille, settled back into comforting familiarity." So it had been a dream after all, she thought until she saw him again. He had been hiding behind the head of her bed and now he was gliding toward her sister. This time her scream rose thin and shrill In the silence, shocking everything to life. In an instant the man had shot across the room and dived out the window right through the screen it seemed; the sleepers all popped up like Jacks-in-the-box. "Mary Evelyn!" exclaimed Sister Camille.

"What's the matter? Vhafeare you screaming about?" "There was a man in here!" the child gasped "He was standing right by my bed! He jumped out the window!" "Nonsense!" said Sister Camille. turning And then she remembered her dream of the wind fingering her hair. It hadn't been the winj; it had been that man, touching her! As she collapsed on the bed, the third little girl, 7-year-old Edna Marie Haydel, announced that her hair had been cut, too. It was true. Her head had been effectively, if raggedly, shorn and she had slept right through it.

And so, a few weeks ago, began the weirdest series of robberies this country has seen since the days of the tickletoe burglar of New Tork and the trouserless kiss bandit of St. Louis. Pascagoula, ordinarily a sleepy little Mississippi town, now swollen to a population of 15,000 under the stimulus of war shipbuilding, is the scene of the new crime wave or perhaps crime hair wave would be a better phrase, as hair seems to be the marauder's sole objective. Pending his capture and positive identification, he has been nicknamed "The Phantom Barber," the supposition being that only a barber gone berserk would risk his life for such loot. But there is a dissenting minority which points out that if there is one thing a barber is likely to be sick to death of it is hair.

If one should run berserk, they say, it would probably be hair that drove him to it and he would do his running in the opposite direction. Some members of this group have offered the counter-suggestion that their home town scourge is a Fifth Columnist, working to collect hair for Axis bomb-sights. Others hold that it is being stolen for use in back country "hex" ceremonies. Whatever the correct explanation (and few psychiatrists would credit any of these) the fact is that the citizens of the Mississippi boom town have been thoroughly terrorized. Parents have started sleeping in their children's rooms; pistols are at a premium; and, come night, most windows are kept tightly shut But all these precautions, plus an imported pack of bloodhounds, have so far been unavailing.

Nobody has caught even a good look at the phantom hair-snatcher, let alone the man himself. The best description of him to date is that of little Mary Evelyn Briggs, who was shorn in the convent. "He was sorta short," she said, "sorta fat and he was wearing a white sweat shirt." Another distinguishing characteristic is his habit broken only once of doing his thiev ing on hand to look after the 6-year-old Peattie twins, David and Carol, a girl. Hearing a noise In the children's room late at night, Mrs. Henshaw woke her husband and together they went to investigate.

At first glance all seemed as usual; both children were sound asleep. Then Mrs. Henshaw noticed the print of a man's bare foot etched in sand on the white counterpane of the vacant bed by the window. Awakened, Carol sat bolt upright, feeling for the blond locks that ordin.irily swept her shoulders. "Why why!" she stuttered, looking dazedly around her.

"Where's my hair?" A lot of it had disappeared; there was no mistake about that She had been given a cut as abbreviated and boyish as her brother's. Once again the window screen was found to have been slit; and the missing locks and the footprint were the only evidences of the man's visit While next week's alarms occurred, as before, on Monday and Friday, the results in each case differed not only from the preceding ones but from each other. R. J. Anderson, head of the engineering planning department of the local shipyard, drove up to his beachside cottage late Monday night just as his wife and small daughter ran out the door, crying that someone was trying to break in a back window.

Whether or not it was the phantom barber, nobody knows, as a search of the neighborhood proved fruitless. On Friday night, after slitting a window screen in the home of Mr. and Mrs. S. T.

Heidelberg, son and daughter-in-law of Fasca- 'goula's city judge, a man entered the bedroom- where the young couple was sleeping. The mode of entry suggests that it may have been the barber. But from that point on the events were not characteristic of him. Instead of hair, Mrs. Heidelberg lost a couple of front teeth, knocked out, before she could scream, by a blow with a solid iron bar.

The same bar, applied to Mr. Heidelberg's skull, prevented any outcry from him. It all happened so quickly that the victims were unable even to describe their attacker. It was after this foray that the aroused townsfolk and police imported the bloodhounds. The dogs picked up a man's trail under a window of the Heidelberg house and led a posse to a pair of bloodstained gloves, discarded in the nearby woods.

They lost the scent a little farther on in a clump of underbrush, where, it was supposed, the fugitive had mounted a bicycle. The final "incident" occurred on a Sunday night two weeks later. And this time there was no doubt who was responsible for it for the loot was once more hair a two-inch-long gray curl from the head of Mrs. R. E.

Taylor. "I was aroused by a noise about midnight I would judge," she told the police. "Then I have a faint recollection of something passing over my face, something with a sickening smell. I woke up later, violently ill." The generally accepted interpretation was that, after cutting the screen of the window beside which she was sleeping, the thief had simply leaned in, passed a handkerchief soaked in chloroform under Mrs. Taylor's nose, and sternly advised her not to scream, adding proudly; "This is no ordinary robbery." Aware that mental cases should be humored, the nurse arose, put on her kimono and engaged her tickling Romeo in conversation.

He talked readily enough as long as the subject was confined to himself, of whom he turned out to be fond. Evidently he had not found many listeners as patient as Miss Cribbs, for in the end he proposed marriage, made a date to meet her the following evening and then rather spoiled the effect of his performance by walking off with her pocketbook. She scarcely expected him to keep the date after that, but she was mistaken. He showed up and seemed both surprised and hurt when she turned him in to the police. John Raymond Eaves, former high school athlete, was the pantsless kiss burglar of St Louis.

His technique was to spot a pretty young woman, find out where she lived, drive up to her house at night, remove his outer garments in the car, and crawl in her window in his underclothes. When she woke up, to find him leaning over to snatch a kiss, or even in bed with her, he would dash to the window and leap out Naturally, a sigh of relief went up from St. Louis women when he was finally caught. He explained his antics with the nonchalant phrase, "Oh, I get a thrill out of them." And then he electrified his police captors by saying: "You boys ought to remember me. I was the high diver at the police circus a couple of years ago." Seems that's where he'd acquired his ability to dive out of windows.

tiii: weekly a on the light Then she noticed the window. The wire screen was hanging loose, cut along the side and bottom edges. Recovering from the surprise of this dis covery, the nun turned her elance to Marv Evelyn (now sobbing in the reaction from fright) and received another surprise. "Your hair!" she cried. "What's happened to your hair?" A look of astonishment snread ovpr th child's tear-stained face as her hand fluttered about her head.

"It's gone!" she whimpered. "It's been cut He must have cut it off!" August 30, 1912 1942, t. American Weekly, Inc. Great Britain Rights Reserved..