Nandor Fodor: Psychical Research, Psychoanalysis, and the Mystery of the Poltergeist

Nandor Fodor was one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century psychical research. A journalist, lawyer, psychoanalyst, and investigator of the paranormal, he became best known for his pioneering theories on the psychological dimensions of mediumship, hauntings, and poltergeist phenomena.

At a time when many Spiritualists interpreted paranormal events as direct evidence of spirits, Fodor asked a more uncomfortable question: could some hauntings and poltergeists arise from the unconscious mind of the living?

This idea brought him severe criticism, especially from Spiritualists, but it also placed him far ahead of his time. Later researchers would increasingly recognise the importance of emotional conflict, trauma, repression, and unconscious psychic processes in certain paranormal cases. Fodor’s work stands at the meeting point of psychical research, psychoanalysis, Spiritualism, and the darker mysteries of the human mind.

Early Life in Hungary

Nandor Fodor was born on 13 May 1895 in Berengszasz, Hungary. He studied law at the Royal Hungarian University of Science in Budapest, earning his law degree in 1917. He also earned a doctorate and worked as a law assistant from 1917 to 1921.

In 1922, he married Amarai Iren, and the couple had a daughter. Although he had a legal education, Fodor’s future would not be limited to law. His restless intelligence, investigative instinct, and fascination with human experience eventually drew him into journalism, psychical research, and psychoanalysis.

Journalism and the Discovery of Psychical Research

From 1921 to 1928, Fodor worked as a journalist. One of his positions was as a staff reporter for the Amerikai Magyar Népszava, also known as the American Hungarian People’s Voice, based in New York.

During his time in New York, Fodor discovered Hereward Carrington’s book Modern Psychic Phenomena, published in 1919. The book deeply impressed him. It introduced him to the world of psychical research and awakened an interest that would dominate the rest of his life.

Fodor used his journalistic position to meet Carrington himself. Carrington, already an important figure in psychical research, introduced him to other prominent investigators and spiritual figures, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Fodor and Carrington became close friends, and Carrington became an important model for Fodor’s later approach to paranormal investigation.

The Influence of Psychoanalysis

Another major influence on Fodor was his meeting with Sandor Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychoanalyst and associate of Sigmund Freud. Fodor interviewed Ferenczi in 1926, and the meeting stimulated his interest in psychoanalysis.

This encounter would shape Fodor’s entire approach to the paranormal. Instead of viewing mediumship, hauntings, and poltergeists only as evidence of spirits, he began to ask what role the unconscious mind might play.

Could repressed emotions create paranormal disturbances?

Could trauma, sexual conflict, anxiety, or buried hostility manifest outwardly as haunting phenomena?

Could some ghosts be psychological as much as spiritual?

These questions became central to Fodor’s work and made him one of the first major investigators to apply psychoanalytic thinking to psychical research.

First Encounters with Spiritualism

In 1927, Fodor was introduced more directly to Spiritualism when he attended a séance with William Cartheuser, a direct voice medium in New York. During the séance, Fodor received what appeared to be a message from his deceased father.

The experience overwhelmed him and strengthened his interest in psychic phenomena. However, Cartheuser’s mediumship was later questioned by some psychical researchers. In one case, an allegedly dead communicator was discovered to be alive. Fodor eventually became disillusioned with Cartheuser, but the séance remained important because it brought him into direct contact with the emotional force of Spiritualism.

For Fodor, the question was no longer abstract. People wanted to believe that the dead survived. Mediums offered comfort, messages, and apparent proof. But the investigator had to ask: what was truly happening?

London, Spiritualism, and Psychical Investigation

In 1928, Fodor moved to London after being hired by Lord Rothermere, the owner of several British newspapers, to work as a secretary on Hungarian projects. He remained in Rothermere’s employment until 1937.

While in London, Fodor became increasingly involved in Spiritualism and psychical research. He gave lectures, wrote articles, and became assistant editor of Light, the oldest British Spiritualist journal, from 1934 to 1935.

He also worked with the London Spiritual Alliance, conducting experiments with mediums and investigating claims of paranormal phenomena. This period placed him at the centre of British Spiritualist and psychical research circles.

In 1934, the International Institute for Psychical Research was formed, bringing together both Spiritualists and non-Spiritualists. Fodor was appointed research officer in 1935. The following year, he became London correspondent for the American Society for Psychical Research.

These positions gave him the opportunity to investigate mediums, hauntings, poltergeists, and other unusual cases. They also brought him into conflict with those who did not want spiritual explanations challenged.

A New Approach to Hauntings and Poltergeists

Before Fodor, relatively little attention had been given to the emotional states of the people involved in hauntings and poltergeist cases. Many investigators asked whether a spirit was present. Fodor asked what was happening inside the human beings at the centre of the phenomena.

This was a bold and controversial shift. Psychoanalysis itself was not widely accepted in Britain at the time, especially because of its focus on sexuality, repression, and unconscious drives. Spiritualists were often offended by the suggestion that some phenomena they considered spirit-based might instead arise from human psychology.

Fodor did not deny that paranormal phenomena might exist. His approach was more subtle. He believed that some hauntings and poltergeists could be expressions of hidden emotional forces, especially when the disturbances seemed centred around a living person.

This made his work difficult for both sides. To sceptics, he was still investigating ghosts and poltergeists. To Spiritualists, he was taking the spirits away.

The Ash Manor Ghost

One of Fodor’s most famous investigations was the Ash Manor Ghost case, which he began investigating in 1936. In this case, he concluded that suppressed sexual energies appeared to contribute to the haunting phenomena.

This interpretation was shocking to many at the time. The idea that a haunting could be connected to repressed sexuality, emotional tension, or unconscious conflict challenged the traditional Spiritualist model of a ghost as an independent spirit of the dead.

The Ash Manor case helped establish Fodor’s reputation as a daring and unconventional investigator. It also marked him as a threat to those who wanted psychical research to support clear spiritualist conclusions.

The Thornton Heath Poltergeist

Fodor’s most controversial case was the Thornton Heath Poltergeist, which he began investigating in 1938. The case involved a woman whose personal and emotional difficulties appeared to be connected to poltergeist phenomena and alleged vampire attacks.

Fodor concluded that the disturbances were rooted in psychological conflict rather than external spirit activity. His interpretation brought fierce criticism from Spiritualists, who saw his conclusions as an attack on their beliefs.

The backlash was intense. Fodor came under sustained attack, especially from the Spiritualist newspaper Psychic News. Eventually, he sued the paper for libel in 1938.

The controversy also affected his professional position. J. Arthur Findlay, a Spiritualist and founder and chairman of the International Institute for Psychical Research, resigned in protest against Fodor’s theories. Shortly afterwards, Fodor was dismissed from his post as research officer.

Freud’s Encouragement

During this period of criticism, Fodor received support from an unexpected and important source: Sigmund Freud.

Freud read Fodor’s manuscript on the Thornton Heath case and wrote him an encouraging letter, stating that he considered Fodor’s conclusions in that case very probable.

This support mattered. Fodor was trying to bring together two difficult fields: psychoanalysis and psychical research. Freud’s response gave him intellectual encouragement at a time when Spiritualist critics were attacking him fiercely.

In 1939, Fodor won two of his four libel charges, though he was awarded only minor monetary damages. Soon afterwards, he left his role as London correspondent for the American Society for Psychical Research and returned to New York.

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Return to New York and Psychoanalytic Work

After returning to New York, Fodor became a successful psychoanalyst. He eventually became an editor of the Psychoanalytic Review, the oldest psychoanalytic journal in the United States, and served on the teaching staff of the Training Institute of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.

In America, he found a more favourable atmosphere for his psychoanalytic approach to psychical research. He resumed his association with Hereward Carrington and also worked with Eileen J. Garrett, the well-known medium and psychical research figure whom he had previously met in England.

Fodor wrote numerous articles for Garrett’s journal Tomorrow, continuing to explore the relationship between the supernatural, the unconscious, and human experience.

Fodor’s Criticism of Mediumistic Fraud

Fodor’s controversies with Spiritualists did not make him abandon psychical research. Instead, he became increasingly critical of mediumistic fraud and careless claims.

He believed that psychical research had often tried too hard to imitate laboratory science and had lost something essential in the process. Mediums, he argued, did not function well when treated like guinea pigs. The relationship between investigator and subject was more delicate, complex, and emotionally charged than many researchers wanted to admit.

At the same time, he did not romanticise mediumship. He exposed questionable practices and remained aware of fraud, wishful thinking, and psychological projection. This made him a difficult figure to categorise. He was not a simple believer, but he was not a dismissive sceptic either.

He stood in the uncomfortable middle ground where serious occult investigation often belongs.

The Haunted Mind

Fodor’s later work explored the idea that hauntings, ghosts, and poltergeist phenomena could reveal hidden aspects of the psyche. His book The Haunted Mind: A Psychoanalyst Looks at the Supernatural, published in 1959, captures this approach clearly.

For Fodor, the supernatural could not be separated from the human mind. A haunting was not always only about a ghost in a house. It might also be about an unresolved trauma, a repressed desire, a conflict within a family, or a psychic eruption from the unconscious.

This does not make the phenomena meaningless. On the contrary, it may make them more meaningful. A haunting may reveal something that the conscious mind refuses to face. A poltergeist may dramatise an inner conflict that has no other way to express itself.

This psychological approach is one of Fodor’s most important contributions to occult and paranormal studies.

An Encyclopedia of Psychic Science

Fodor’s most important work is An Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, published in 1934. It remains a classic reference work in the field of psychical research and is still valued for its breadth, detail, and historical importance.

He compiled the encyclopedia after moving to London, partly because he needed a concise reference tool for his own reading and investigations. The result was a major work that captured the state of psychical research from the late 19th century up to the early 1930s.

The encyclopedia was reissued with corrections in 1966. It was later combined with Lewis Spence’s Encyclopedia of the Occult to become The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. Later editions were edited by Leslie Shepard and then by J. Gordon Melton, with a fifth edition released in 2004.

Through this work, Fodor’s influence extended far beyond his own investigations. He helped preserve and organise the knowledge of a field that often exists on the margins of accepted science.

Major Publications

Nandor Fodor wrote extensively on psychical research, psychoanalysis, dreams, poltergeists, and occult phenomena. His major books include Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, These Mysterious People, The Search for the Beloved, Haunted People, New Approaches to Dream Interpretation, On the Trail of the Poltergeist, The Haunted Mind, Mind Over Space, Between Two Worlds, The Unaccountable, and Freud, Jung, and Occultism.

His articles and papers explored subjects such as hauntings, mysterious knockings, telepathy in analysis, the psychoanalysis of poltergeist phenomena, sex and mediumship, the problems of occultism, and the reputation of ghost-hunter Harry Price.

These writings show the range of his interests. Fodor was not content to remain in one discipline. He moved between journalism, occult investigation, psychoanalysis, mediumship, dreams, poltergeist research, and the study of the unconscious.

Fodor’s Legacy

Nandor Fodor died on 17 May 1964. He left behind nine major books, many articles, and a lasting influence on psychical research.

His greatest contribution was not simply that he investigated hauntings or poltergeists. It was that he changed the question. Instead of asking only, “Is there a spirit here?” he also asked, “What is happening in the human mind?”

That question remains vital.

Modern researchers of poltergeist phenomena continue to consider emotional stress, unconscious conflict, trauma, family tension, and the psychology of the agent. These themes were controversial in Fodor’s time, but they later became central to many discussions of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis and person-centred hauntings.

Fodor’s work reminds us that the supernatural and the psychological may not always be separate. A ghost may be a spirit. A poltergeist may be psychic energy. A haunting may be memory, trauma, or projection. The mystery lies in the fact that the inner and outer worlds may sometimes interact in ways we still do not fully understand.

Why Nandor Fodor Still Matters

Nandor Fodor matters because he brought depth, courage, and psychological insight to the study of the paranormal. He was willing to challenge Spiritualists, sceptics, and researchers alike. He understood that extraordinary phenomena must be investigated carefully, but also that human emotion cannot be removed from the investigation.

His work is especially important for anyone interested in poltergeists. He helped open the way for the idea that destructive hauntings may be connected to unconscious forces in the living, particularly unresolved emotional or sexual conflicts. This was scandalous in his own day, but deeply influential in the long term.

For occultists, Fodor’s work offers an important warning and invitation. Not every spirit is outside us. Not every haunting belongs to the dead. Sometimes the most powerful ghost is the one created by the hidden self.