A Kansas mother is praising a neighbor as "superman" after her 6-year-old daughter told her he somehow found the strength to lift a car off her.

The girl escaped with minor injuries after she and neighbor Nick Harris said she was pinned under the vehicle.

"He really is Superman," Kristen Hough, the child's mother, said of Harris, the man she said saved her daughter, Ashlyn.

Harris, 32, said he doesn't know how he managed to lift the Mercury sedan off the child. The 5-foot-7, 185-pound Harris said he tried later that day to lift other cars and couldn't.

"But somehow, adrenaline, hand of God, whatever you want to call it, I don't know how I did it," he said.

Harris was dropping off his 8-year-old daughter at school when he saw a driver backing her car out of a driveway and over the child, Harris said.

"I didn't even think. I ran over there as fast as I could, grabbed the rear end of the car and lifted and pushed as hard as I could to get the tire off the child," he said.

He realized the little girl was Ashlyn, a friend of his daughter's. Harris carried the screaming first-grader to the sidewalk and was going to get his phone to call 911, but Ashlyn said she wanted him to stay with her.

He told people nearby to get the child's mother, who lives a block away.

There were no witnesses to confirm what happened.

But Ottawa police Lt. Adam Weingartner said, "I don't have anything to dispute it.

Hough said Ashlyn told her Harris lifted the car off her, Weingartner said.

Weingartner, the first officer at the scene, said Harris "was amped up pretty good. The first words out of his mouth were, 'I lifted the car off the girl.'"

He said it appeared Ashlyn wasn't pinned under the car long enough to be seriously hurt, Weingartner said.

Hough said her daughter was released from the hospital that afternoon with a concussion and some scrapes.

"She is my little walking miracle right now," Hough said. "He truly is a superhero in the family's eyes.

Harris also visited Ashlyn later that day and was greeted with a big hug.

"I don't consider myself a hero at all," Harris said. "To me, it was payment enough when she gave me that huge hug and said, 'Thanks, Superman.'"

It has been folklore for the longest time that under certain conditions of stress, the human body can achieve phenomenal strength or even psychic or healing powers. Lifting a car or an extremely heavy item off of another person is not all that unique a story. Several cases have been documented over the past 50 years.

Stay-at-home moms have been noted for lifting large appliances, like refrigerators, off of toddlers who somehow found their way under a toppled one. Large rocks have been lifted or even thrown when ordinary people felt trapped or threatened in camping accidents or animal attacks.

Most scientists believe that adrenaline plays a huge part in these amazing feats of heroism. What's refered to as the "fight-or-flight response," attributes to the sudden activity of the adrenal gland, causing an adrenaline rush. An adrenaline rush causes the muscles to perform fermentation (no kidding) at an increased rate, thereby dramatically improving strength.

Strong psychic activity or intuition has also been known to happen, such as a mother washing dishes at home suddenly feeling a tremendous urge to check on her child playing outside, only to discover that his foot was trapped in a hole and he was not close enough for her to hear him calling. One man stated that he had the strangest notion not to board a plane, which later crashed with no survivors.

Others have been told that they have a terminal illness, only to find themselves remarkably healed the following weeks. It's been speculated that there are parts of the brain that we don't normally use that may be capable of sending or receiving distress signals telepathically or even naturally healing our bodies on levels we did not think were possible.

Contrary to popular belief, most of the brain is being used at all times. Certain parts are more active during certain activities but on average the brain is active all around. A lot of what we don't know about the human mind and how it works leaves certain "sci-fi" possibilities, but I suggest you do your own research and draw your own conclusions.

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