Paul Tabori

Paul Tabori (Pál Tábori) (1908-1974) was a Hungarian author, novelist, journalist and psychical researcher. He also wrote under the name Peter Stafford. He was the brother of writer and theatre director George Tabori.

Tabori was born on 5 August 1908, in Budapest, Hungary. His father Cornelius died in Auschwitz in 1944, but with his mother managed to escape the Nazis (fleeing to Budapest). Paul moved to London in 1938 and made his home in Kensington at Stafford Terrace.

He obtained a Ph.D. from Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm University and graduated as a Doctor of Economic and Political Science at Pazmany Peter University. He worked as a journalist in Hungary and London. Tabori was the literary executor for the Harry Price estate, he also wrote a biography of Price.

Tabori was the vice-president of The Ghost Club for a number of years until his death.

He died on 9 November 1974.

In The Art of Folly (1961), Tabori included a chapter that documented the fraud of various spiritualist mediums. Stephen Potter in a review wrote the book "gives us one of the best brief accounts I have ever read of the scientific examination of the claims of spiritualists, and the delusions of such great men as Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle".

Tabori and Peter Underwood in their book Ghosts of Borley (1973) wrote they believed "some of the phenomena were genuine" at the Borley Rectory. The researcher Trevor H. Hall criticized Tabori and Underwood for selective reporting. According to Hall the alleged paranormal phenomena from the rectory were the result of natural causes such as various creaks heard from the movement of rats or the flying of bats in the house. Pranks such a local village boys throwing stones at the house, or tramps trying to keep warm by lighting small fires in the rectory.

Piet Hein Hoebens with Marcello Truzzi evaluated some psychic detective cases in prewar Germany that were featured in Tabori's Crime and the Occult (1974), concluding the cases had been misreported.

Non-fiction

• Harry Price: The Biography of a Ghost Hunter (1950)
• Alexander Korda (1959)
• The Art of Folly (1961)
• Companions of the Unseen (1968)
• Dress and Undress (1969)
• Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historic Study (1971)
• Erotic Edwardian Fairy Tales (1970)
• Beyond the Senses: A Report on Psychical Research in the Sixties (1971)
• Erotic Victorian Fairy Tales (1971)
• Secret and Forbidden (1971)
• Social History of Rape (1971)
• Pioneers of the Unseen (1972)
• With Peter Underwood. Ghosts of Borley: Annals of the Haunted Rectory (1973)
• Crime and the Occult: A Forensic Study (1974)
• The Natural History of Stupidity (1993) (Originally published as The Natural Science of Stupidity, 1959)

Fiction

• They Came to London (1943)
• The Lion and the Vulture (1944)
• Solo (1948)
• The Talking Tree (1950)
• The Frontier (1950)
• The Green Rain (1961)
• The Survivors (1964)
• The Doomsday Brain (1967)
• The Invisible Eye (1967)
• The Torture Machine (1969)
• The Cleft (1969)
• The Demons of Sandorra (1970)
• Lily Dale (1972)
• The Wild White Witch (1973)