As the summer of 1883 drew to a close, a small community in Sedartown, Tennessee, hosted an ever-growing line of visitors, drawn to witness the incredible feats attributed to 14-year-old Lulu Hirst, the timid, fragile daughter of a local Baptist minister.
Reporters from the Atlanta Constitution and the Rome Bulletin came, admired, and wrote brilliant stories "about the amazing Lulu Hirst."
It was impossible to avoid public speaking. Deeply religious parents resisted this in every possible way, but in such a situation they were forced to give in to the insistent demand of the crowd, who wanted to see Lulu. With great reluctance, they nevertheless allowed her to appear in front of the Sedartown crowd, for which they rented a large hall.
It was September and it was hot. The hall was jam-packed with people gathered from all directions. The stage, illuminated by a dozen kerosene lamps, gathered guests of honor, including judges, lawyers, doctors, bankers and members of the local magistrate. Lulu's father was to act as the steward of the ceremony.
A tall, sturdy man from the audience who volunteered to participate in the performance went up to the stage and was handed a folded umbrella. He firmly grasped the handle of the umbrella with his hands and pressed it to his feet, as before that he had been warned that the umbrella should not move.
Lulu Hirst, barely reaching his shoulder, stepped forward and placed the palm of her right hand on the umbrella. For a whole minute in deathly silence, barely broken by the rustle of fans, this act was played out. It was as if the devil himself suddenly descended on the stage: the man and the umbrella began to move and twitch up and down, they began to be thrown from side to side.
Lulu's palm continued to lie on the umbrella, and the farmer, clutching it with both hands, could not do anything: he was thrown along with the umbrella all over the stage. It was clear that the man had lost the fight. The last spurt - and he flew into the arms of the honorable guests on the stage, and Lulu fell, barely catching her breath.
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The stunned spectators froze with open mouths. How could it happen that such a fragile girl threw a grown man across the stage, despite his best efforts to stay in place?
The audience had not yet had time to come to their senses, and the second number was already preparing. Three men from among the guests of honor stood close to each other, firmly grasping the walnut cane, holding it at chest level. Lulu put the palm of her left hand on the cane, and after a moment these respectable people flew upside down at all undignified to the great delight of the audience.
The play lasted more than an hour and consisted of variations on the theme "A girl and her power tricks that defy comprehension." The public, including reporters, dispersed in a state of excitement.
This public performance by Lulu, instead of appeasing the audience, became widely known and resulted in numerous requests for a repeat performance. Naturally, Lulu Hirst soon received invitations from all major cities in the country. For two years, the attraction with her participation was the most popular.
The bizarre sequence of events that first brought Lulu onto the stage at Sedartown actually began two weeks before the performance described, namely after the thunderstorm. Lulu and her cousin Laura went to bed, but could not sleep, frightened by the bright flashes of lightning.
Suddenly it seemed to them that there were some claps. They searched the room, but did not find where these strange sounds were coming from. As the girls climbed into bed, the clapping started again, this time right under the pillows.
They called Lulu's parents and told them what was happening, but the parents searched the room and found nothing. The search and tapping of the walls of the room continued for several hours, until finally the adults reassured the girls, saying that perhaps this was due to lightning and a strong thunderstorm.
It seemed to everyone that a completely plausible explanation had been found, and they calmed down, but only until the next night. The next night, Lulu's bed rang and rattled, there were obvious jerks and blows if any of the frightened family members dared to put their hand on the headboard. Reverend Hirst called his neighbors - there were about twelve of them.
Neighbors, also alarmed, judged and judged, not knowing what to think. They clearly heard the bangs and felt the walls of Lulu's bedroom shudder. One had only to say to someone: "Maybe someone is up there?" - how immediately, as if in confirmation, a terrible blow fell on the ceiling. In the end, those present decided that someone had started a game with them. The correct answer, where the sound comes from, was followed by one blow, the wrong one - two short knocks.
This phenomenon is known as poltergeist and is almost always associated with children, or at least teenagers. In this case, one thing is absolutely clear: this activity is associated with the presence of fourteen-year-old Lulu.
The real poltergeist manifested itself on the fourth day, when suddenly there began to be heard pops under the pillow. The Hirst family was visited by a relative, and the unsuspecting Lulu took and handed her a chair. A relative was so thrown against the wall that she crashed to the floor!
Others tried to hold on to the spinning chair, but with the same result. There were four hung on the chair, but they too could not cope with the force that sat in the chair. She simply ground a chair, and the stunned people remained sitting on the floor, barely catching their breath. Lulu burst into tears and ran out of the house.
Lulu performed such numbers countless times on stage for two years. Her second public appearance took place at the Gives Opera House in Atlanta. The opera house was jam-packed with curious people.
Lulu added two more to the numbers she had worked out at Sedartown. In one of the new numbers, Lulu touched a billiard cue with two fingers of her right hand, and two adult men, trying to press the free end of it to the floor, could not cope with the cue.
In front of the enthusiastic roaring crowd, Lulu was finishing her performance with a hit number: three men sat on a simple kitchen chair, astride each other. Lulu walked over to the chair, put her palms on the back and raised her hands up.
As the arms were raised, a chair with three riders rose to a height of about 6 inches from the platform. The chair hung in the air for two minutes, while a group of skeptical professors took measurements … and threw up their hands.
When Lulu appeared in front of the students of the Medical College in Charleston, South Carolina, the stage for the performance was arranged so that everything could be seen from all sides, so that the trick did not pass from the meticulous spectators who saw the catch in advance.
The Charleston News and Courier reported on this performance the next day:
“… A more well-known and skeptical audience could hardly be imagined. There is no doubt that all the color of the scientists of the state gathered … But even among this public there was not a single one capable of explaining the mystery of the phenomenon … The interest in the performance was so great that there were no empty seats in Hibernian Hall. The audience gathered in Charleston was infected with skepticism.
All the seats were occupied, the brightly lit stage was clearly visible from all sides, and one could not count on deception. Everything that was happening was not only visible from all sides, but also the stage itself was attended by trusted representatives, ready to grab any hint of an unclean game."
And this time Lulu's speech to the pundits of Charleston was a tremendous success, which was repeated several times later. Lulu gave a private presentation at the Augusta Public College of Medicine. College teachers and students held out their hands to objects that Lulu touched, and they were also severely thrown aside.
Lulu's most impressive and representative appearance in front of the audience took place in Washington, DC. Before her speech, Lulu was given a condition: she must undergo a thorough examination by the country's leading scientists. Lulu readily agreed.
This examination took place in the laboratory of Professor Graham Bell in the presence of twenty scientists specially invited for the occasion.
Was Lulu's power a form of electricity?
Lulu climbed onto a glass platform, isolated from the platform by glass tubes, but the "power" showed itself immediately. After that, she appeared on a platform equipped with scales. A 200-pound man sat on a chair next to the scales.
Lulu bent over, lifted the chair with the man off the floor, but the scales, instead of showing the total weight (of Miss Hearst and the man she lifted), only showed the weight of the latter !!! Astonished scientists suspected that the scales were out of order.
The scales were checked immediately, but they were in perfect order. The scales showed the correct weight when Lulu and the man stood on them, but as soon as Lulu lifted the latter, her weight seemed to disappear … or his weight dropped to zero.
Scientists took blood from Lulu for analysis, measured her height and weight, asked her a bunch of questions about her overwhelming abilities.
Lulu claimed that she personally did not know where she got it from, but the scientists themselves threw up their hands, because after the experiments they were more puzzled than before.
Impresario Charles Fromen managed to get Lula to perform at the Wallach Theater in New York. Lulu surprised and delighted the large city crowd by defeating all the strong men from the city athletic club in turn. For five weeks she performed at full houses, and the New York newspapers lifted her to heaven.
After the triumph in New York, a country tour followed with a visit to Boston, where she felt the fear of performing on stage. Then there were Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and finally Knoxville. By this time she had worked out one more number at the end of the day.
Scattering adult men like toys across the stage, she invited them to take revenge: Lulu took a billiard cue in her hands, pressed it to her chest and, standing on one leg, turned to the shamed men with a proposal to move her from her place - no one succeeded.
In 1885, a little over two years after the start of her performances, Lulu Hirst told reporters that she would stop speaking and go home with her young husband to live like everyone else. Proposals from Europe and Asia remained unanswered. Lulu Hirst had enough.
The reasons that prompted Lulu to leave the stage remain as unclear as the very "power" that made her fabulously rich in just two years.
After her dramatic and unexpected decision to leave the stage, Lulu flatly refused to give any explanation about this. But too many questions remained unanswered, too many scientists were baffled. She eventually “explained,” but her explanation in no way clarified the whole story.
She stated: “I began to be haunted by heavy thoughts that my 'power' could put a lot of superstition and illusion into the minds of people … As my fame grew, so did people's superstition, and at the same time my doubts. I knew that I had an amazing a force that obviously defied explanation, but did not want to be looked at as something out of the ordinary and unnatural.
I hated being famous and supernormal. I met everywhere spiritualists who pointed their fingers at me and said: "Here is a great medium", although I have always been against such a name. Then I could not explain the nature of my "strength", but I always rejected such theories. My phenomenon was used to confirm all kinds of ridiculous and superstitious ideas and signs. I have been burdened by this for a long time."
This obviously cheap trick also had a cheap effect. No doubt this statement was written for Lulu by some outsider who did not know her intimately and had no idea of her intelligence and education. And the parents themselves were not distinguished by learning. Someone prepared a statement for Lulu to get the girl out of her predicament. But the public continued to demand real explanations.
Then a new explanation emerged that further complicated the issue. Those claps, she assured, were nothing more than a "childish prank" - she simply pierced the pillow with a hat pin. And the tapping was heard because she kicked the steps. As for the violent force breaking chairs and throwing people around, Lulu called it "reflected power."
When forced to speak out more clearly, Lulu described this force as "an unidentified mechanical principle based on the effects of leverage and balance, causing the specified force to reflect the blow in the direction of the partner, and sometimes on himself."
The performance information of the girl, who weighed only 115 pounds (52 kg), is widely reflected in the relevant documents. Its numbers at one time received the highest attestation mark. It is unlikely that in our time anyone will be able to explain her amazing abilities. It is also quite clear that Lulu Hirst was not entirely sincere with the scientists and journalists who were looking for an answer to the riddle.
At that moment, when bangs and tapping were heard in the parents' house for the first time, sounds and noise were noticed even when Lulu was not in bed and could not "play pranks", piercing the pillow with a hat pin or knocking her foot on the steps. Some of the blows were so strong that they resembled blows of a blacksmith's hammer, which completely refutes Lulu's explanation.
During the tour, Lulu was repeatedly examined and questioned in detail by famous scientists.
From time to time they wrote down the following answer to Lulu: “she knows nothing about the source of“power.”If she was telling the truth then, then two years later she was telling an obvious lie. All her arguments about the unknown principle of action of leverage and balance with a reflection of the force applied to her, cost nothing.
The solution to the riddle of Lulu Hirst lies, perhaps, in the religious beliefs of her father and uncle, who were priests.
As representatives of the church, both of them opposed the use of incomprehensible forces by people associated with occult phenomena. The more Lulu gave ideas, the more excited the minds of the common people and scientists, unable to explain what was happening. And all this eventually led to an explosion of enthusiasm for spiritualism, and the church immediately felt this threat.
A year after the tour, another factor intervened in Lulu's life. Wherever she went with her numbers, she and her parents were greeted by groups of priests and made it clear that everything she does deeply worries the church and they pray for her to free her from this heavy burden. It was a well-organized pressure that neither her parents nor Lulu herself could simply brush aside.
After her parents left the business, Lulu continued to conduct it for some time with the help of a young man, whom she later married. Money flowed like a river not only for the performances themselves, but also in the form of interest on advertising for soap, soft drinks, cigars and even plows, which were called: "Strong as Lulu Hirst."
With a lot of money, with a young husband, constantly forced by her parents to leave the stage, Lulu returned home from the tour, forever saying goodbye to the light of the stage.
The first "explanation" of Lulu was prepared in advance without taking into account her abilities, it smacked of idle talk, it ridiculed spiritualism. If we consider her second explanation to be true, then all the previous statements will have to be recognized as lies. We will have to admit in this case that for two years she managed to lead by the nose and cheat the country's leading scientists, and her parents seemed to help her in this. But this assumption should be dismissed as untenable.
What are we left with? With numerous Lulu numbers and a host of failures on the part of scientists to bring them under the laws of nature. Since the scientists themselves could not find an explanation for what was happening and were unable to comprehend and understand it, it would be cruel on our part not to excuse fifteen-year-old Lulu for the same reasons.