"Little Lulu"
The Fragile Girl Who Overpowered All Challengers

When a thunderstorm rattled the hamlet of Cedartown, TN, one summer night in 1883, a 14-year-old girl named Lulu Hurst and her cousin tried in vain to go to sleep. They were frightened by the rumbles and flashes, and discombobulated by what they would describe to their elders as muted "pops" in the bedroom. At one point, the popping seemed to originate beneath their pillows.

Thus commenced a poltergeist-like phenomenon that reportedly was witnessed by legions and culminated in public displays of supernatural power. The night after the storm, Lulu's bed and the walls of her room set about a regular thumping and rapping enigma that alarmed and baffled the family and neighbors who were called in to observe. Things got more than a little weird a few days after the storm when Lulu offered a chair to one of her relatives. The touch of the furniture allegedly sent the visitor reeling into a wall. Grown men were summoned to manhandle the "live" chair, and failed. The episode ended with the chair ripped asunder and Lulu fleeing the house in terror at her own apparently superhuman touch.

Her father, a Baptist church deacon, reluctantly arranged a "performance" at the town hall to demonstrate that the sensational rumors of Lulu's bizarre powers of touch—which quickly had spread as far as Atlanta, GA—were not doltish back-country shenanigans. Reporters showed up from notable dailies throughout the region. They were genuinely impressed when the frail, meekly Lulu flexed. In one demonstration, three men stood abreast and grasped a cane tightly against their chests. "Little Lulu" opened her left hand flat and pressed the palm to the cane. The men were sent flying.

Here was a show much too large for the Cedartown hall. Soon, "Little Lulu" was onstage before a standing-room-only audience at an Atlanta opera house. Her sponsors had added new feats of strength. For example, Lulu had three men sit stacked in a chair. She grasped the chair legs and lifted the whole configuration several inches off the floor. For two minutes, examiners—reportedly including college professors—took measurements. She gave similar performances at medical colleges in Augusta, GA, and Charleston, SC.

She went on to Alexander Graham Bell's laboratory in Washington, DC, where her audience included scientists from the Naval Observatory and the Smithsonian Institution. Among other experiments, they had her lift a 200-pound man off the floor. Aside from the exhibit of unbelievable strength, the inexplicable aspect of that exercise was that Lulu was perched on a pair of scales, while the man was seated in a chair beside them. Yet, when she lifted the man, only his weight registered on the scales. The scientists double-checked, weighing the two individuals separately.

For two years, Lulu gave performances as far away as New England and Chicago. She outmuscled men of the New York Athletic Club. She confounded the press. But she quickly grew weary of the road and of her peculiar repute. After two years, she "retired" to live a normal domestic life with her road manager, whom she'd married while on tour. She deprecatingly played down her apparent superhuman abilities vaguely as "unrecognized mechanical principles," and even claimed the original bedroom pops and taps were impish pranks she'd played on her cousin and neighbors.

Skeptics suggested the whole enigma of "Little Lulu" was indeed a farce. But if so, much remains unexplained, either by critics or by the retiring Lulu herself. And regardless, her name is immortalized in nostalgic evidence. Soap and cigar makers of the day paid her handsomely for the use of her name. For years, farmers plowed their land with implements touted to be "strong as Lulu Hurst."

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