Creep haunts salons with ‘The Call’
It starts with a call from a private number, before a low husky voice asks ‘‘can I speak to the lady barber?’’
Hairdressers and barbers around the country have dubbed it ‘‘the call’’ and it’s been going on for years.
Canterbury barber Jodie Boland received the call for the first time a few weeks ago.
‘‘Hello darling,’’ the caller began. Boland described the caller’s voice like Agnes Brown from Mrs Brown’s Boys, but with an Australian accent. She was unsure of the caller’s gender.
‘‘She or he introduced herself as Christine. She said she had two lesbian daughters who had been naughty, and they needed their heads shaved as punishment.’’
The older daughter, with shoulderlength hair, would have a flat top, the caller said, and asked Boland how she would do it.
‘‘She said, ‘ooh describe how you will do it, ooh how short’.
‘‘I explained I would use a number two blade, then a one then a zero to fade’’.
Boland was giggling at first, but then it got weird.
‘‘Then she said ‘ooh I wish I could be there to watch and hear her yell mummy no, mummy no.’
‘‘Tease her a little bit, be stern with her,’’ the caller said.
By this point, Boland was ‘‘creeped out’’ and concerned about the children, if they were real.
Feeling obliged to make the appointment after what she estimated was 15 minutes on the call, Boland booked the daughters in for the following Tuesday.
Boland had taken what she thought was Christine’s number for the appointment but when she tried to call it back it was an unallocated number.
‘‘I stressed about it all weekend, if it was real, it sounded like child abuse, and I was not comfortable doing it.’’
Tuesday came around and the caller and their daughters did not show up.
‘‘I had never been so relieved,’’ Boland said.
She told another hairdresser about her experience the following week.
‘‘She said ‘oh my God you’ve had ‘The Call’’. She said it was 100% some weird fetish.’’
Visiting a Facebook page for New Zealand professional hairdressers, Boland found that hairdressers and barbers around the country had been harassed by The Call for years.
Stylist Stef Hack, who used to work at Who’s Ya Barber in Hamilton, got The Call every few weeks.
Christine called her about six to 10 times, and it was an experience much the same as Boland’s.
‘‘It was a male voice. He must have some serious issues,’’ Hack said.
Christine would call and ask for a ‘‘lady’’ hairdresser.
‘‘It was the same every time. She would want to bring her teenage daughters in for a fade because they had been ‘naughty and needed to be taught a lesson’.’’
Hack said the caller would spend an unusual amount of time describing what they wanted for their daughters then would ask Hack to describe how she would do it.
‘‘It was creepy, it makes you wonder what is happening in their life that they’re doing this,’’ Hack said.
Laura Marham had the call about three times a year for seven years at her salon in Hawke’s Bay.
The Hair Envy salon owner’s experience was a little different.
Christine would call and ask about booking themselves and their mother in for a perm.
‘‘He or she said they wanted to look like the Queen Mother.’’
Christine would ask for details on perm prices, stylist availability and step by step details on the perm process.
‘‘It was creepy, but I didn’t think it was sexual, I just thought it was a lonely old man.
‘‘In the end I would just say if you want an appointment you need to pay a deposit, then he would hang up,’’ Marham said.
She posted about it on the Facebook page and was shocked to see the response of salons and barber shops that had had The Call, some even in Australia.
‘‘He’s on the rounds again,’’ one commenter said.
‘‘He must call every salon in New Zealand,’’ another said.
Nathan Gaunt, an Auckland-based psychologist who specialises in dealing with people with sexual problems and sexual offending, said the phone calls were concerning, deviant and met the criteria of abuse.
‘‘It seems they are trying to get material for a deviant fantasy.’’
It sounded like the calls were about fooling victims and getting them to be complicit in something they did not understand, Gaunt said.
‘‘There is also the power aspect, ‘can I be deviant and get around somebody’s defences and make them do something that I find arousing’.’’
He described it as being like playing a slot machine.
‘‘You pull the lever 10 times, you might get a prize once. So it becomes a game, it becomes compelling, which can become addictive or compulsive’’.
Gaunt said it sounded more like paraphilia than a fetish. Paraphilias are persistent and recurrent sexual interests, urges, fantasies, or behaviours of marked intensity involving objects or activities.
It was important to shut the caller down, Gaunt said.
‘‘It might appear harmless or victimless, but I think it is quite harmful.’’
Gaunt encouraged hairdressers to report the calls to police.