Born: 1869, United States
Died: 13 May 1950
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Lula Hurst
The following is shared from The New Georgia Encyclopedia, which allows the use of protected materials for noncommercial educational purposes.
Beginning in 1883, several young women from Georgia astonished the nation by demonstrating strange powers in their vaudeville acts. For years afterward, they were among the most popular and controversial variety performers in America and Europe. Two of these women, Lulu Hurst and Annie Abbott, were particularly successful.
Lulu Hurst, the first Georgia Wonder, was born in 1869 in Polk County. In September 1883 she gained local attention by demonstrating mysterious abilities: chairs, canes, and umbrellas, held by others, seemed gripped by an invisible power when Hurst touched them lightly.
In one of her demonstrations, a volunteer, usually a man of considerable strength, held a cane horizontally in both hands. When Hurst placed her open hands on the cane, the man could no longer hold it steady. Holding it became as difficult as “trying to hold down a flash of lightning,” as one volunteer put it. In some cases the volunteer himself was pulled about by a mysterious power and even thrown to the floor. With such demonstrations, and the help of theatrical manager Sanford H. Cohen and newspaper editor Henry Grady, Hurst’s vaudeville act was soon in demand throughout Georgia and beyond.
Hurst and her parents toured the South and Northeast in 1884, and the West and Midwest in 1884-85. By the conclusion of her northeastern tour, including highly successful appearances in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., Hurst, just fifteen, was one of the most famous women in the country. In her western tour, however, Hurst found audiences increasingly uncooperative, as other women duplicated her act and observers explained her feats. In fall 1885 Hurst cancelled a tour of Europe, retired from the stage, and retreated into silence.
Hurst refused to discuss her career or her powers until 1897, when she published a best-selling autobiography that gave a selective account of her tours and an explanation of her methods. She then resumed her silence about her theatrical years and maintained it to her death on May 13, 1950.
Hurst’s fame and substantial earnings inspired many imitators, including Mattie Lee Price of Bartow County and Mamie Simpson of Marietta, but the most successful was known as “Annie Abbott, the Little Georgia Magnet.”
Controversy followed these Georgia Wonders for decades, in part because their demonstrations raised questions about both the paranormal and women’s abilities and roles, two prominent cultural debates of the late nineteenth century.