I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's

news archives for stories that filled cramped newspaper columns.

But don't worry, even among momentous events,

local reporters still squeezed in our kind of news.

But even we were surprised by how, well, weird,

things got down in Pascagoula, Mississippi in June of 1942.

It started with local coverage, though, eventually, the Associated Press ran the story across

the country. It seems as though that summer a nefarious, mysterious, nocturnal, barber was on the loose.

Well, a barber in the broadest sense anyway, as in someone who cuts your hair.

Except, this barber wasn't being paid. In fact, he wasn't even being asked. His clients,

they were at home and asleep in their beds. But let's start at the beginning. Paskagula, Mississippi,

was home to roughly 6,000 people in 1940.

By 1942, that number had more than doubled, all due to the war effort.

Since World War II had begun, Pascagoula's shipbuilding trade had become increasingly important, totally transforming the little

Gulf Coast town. Paskagula was busy and tired, and the nights got a lot more restless on

Friday, June 5th, when the first break-in occurred. According to the San Francisco Examiner, three little girls, two sisters,

Mary Evelyn and Lauren Briggs, and a third child, Edna Haydell, were asleep in their beds at the

Our Lady of Victory's convent school. This particular examiner article begins with what we can safely call

the most melodramatic retelling we've ever seen in print. A sleeping child, a walking nightmare,

shrieks in the night, dark footsteps, gasping breath, it's straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

But once the reporter had his fun, he did manage to work in a few details.

It seems that a nun, Sister Camille, was awoken by screaming from the girl's room.

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