Unsurprisingly, spirit conjuring was also popular in Hungary, which had just recovered from the shock of defeat in the War of Independence and mourned the deaths of its compatriots who had fallen in battle and were executed in reprisal. Jenő Szigeti writes in his study in the Journal of Church History that in 1850 (before the arrival of American mediums in Europe) a German actor named Ludwig Berger gave a spiritist performance in Budapest, and in 1853 the reformed dean of Hajdúhadháza observed that table dancing was becoming fashionable among young men and women. The first Hungarian to write spiritism treatises - albeit in German - was Count Ferenc Szapáry, who tried to harmonise Delejung's mesmeric theory with the new spiritist teachings.

The actor Gábor Egressy was also a great believer in interrogating the dead, and contacted the ghost of Petőfi at a spiritism session in 1854. According to the story, the dead man told him that during the battle of Segesvár he had fled to a cornfield and was stabbed by a Cossack soldier.

Egressy also wrote a letter to János Arany about his experiences. In his reply, the poet expressed his scepticism:

"I say I am one of the sceptics. Not with regard to the fact: I believe it is more than a mechanical force, and I do not accuse reasonable and honest people of fraud. Yesterday I was tempted by my own wife because she moved the table last year. The ghost wanted to write, but couldn't, just scribbled some Krix-Krax across the paper. Maybe the damn thing can't write at all. I think the whole process of writing is formed on the table in the working brain, unconsciously, images and ideas are presented to it and completed, as in a dream; so that sometimes one or two traces of what the working individual knows are retained and supplemented by things he doesn't know, things he doesn't think about".

Arany experimented with spirit conjuration not only with his wife, but also with his daughter Gretel, who died young, and his son Laszlo.

In 1871 the Hungarian Spiritist Society was founded under the leadership of Adolf Grünhut, who had been a military doctor during the War of Independence and was one of the first to promote homeopathic medicine in Hungary. This association was soon renamed the Pest Association of Spiritists. Grünhut's most important mentors were Baron Ödön Vay, a specialist in occult sciences, and his wife Adelma, a supernaturalist with prophetic and healing powers. The latter wrote one of the most widely circulated treatises on Hungarian spiritism, entitled Spirit, Force, Matter, and regularly invited her friends Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant, famous figures in the history of theosophy, to Hungary. Naturally, the Vays also played an important role in the introduction of theosophy, which was closely linked to spiritism in Hungary.

The emergence of the "ghost hunter" movement is also characterised by the founding of a magazine called Celestial Light, which was published until the end of 1944. Grünhut and the Vayes, in line with Kardec's ideas, emphasised the ethical dimension of spiritism, in contrast to those who investigated the physical aspects of communication with spirits and tried to describe them scientifically (the latter were organised around Baron János Mikos and his journal, the Rejtelmes Világ).

As the spiritist Vilmos Tordai, author of a book on the 'occult elements' of Hungarian history, points out, 'the Jewish doctor [Grünhut] became a worshipper and apostle of Christ, and all the members of the association, who could belong to the Jewish religion, after having learned the doctrine of love, became zealous followers of the leader of Christianity and made the Gospel their daily reading'. However, the Catholic Church disapproved of the spread of spiritism. Adelma Vay was very saddened when she was excommunicated and her works were included in the Index.

The rise of spiritist literature was accompanied by the appearance of critical interpretations. Béla Tóth, famous for his collections of anecdotes, devoted a book to the phenomenon of spirit conjuring with psychological considerations in 1903, and in the 1920s the theologian Alajos Wolkenberg published his work Past and Present of Occultism and Spiritism. Tóth and Wolkenberg describe in detail - and at the same time expose - the tricks of the spiritists. One of the most important methods of manifesting the spirits was, along with table dancing and table tapping, automatic writing. We have already seen how it worked in practice with Arany: the medium switched off his mind, let his hand be guided by the spirit and thus put a text on paper (this method was later adopted by the surrealists to free themselves from the bonds of rationality).

Automatic drawing was also practised in a similar way: A railway employee from Miskolc named János Franyeczky achieved a certain fame in his home country for his ‘mediumistic drawings’ of moonflowers, birds from alien planets, elephants and similar phenomena. According to a newspaper article, Franyeczky ‘never drew in his normal state and cannot draw, but only in a psychic way, without a trance, intuitively’. The ‘walking forint’ was also a common method. This is how Béla Tóth describes it:

"We draw a circle on a large sheet of paper, write all the letters of the alphabet evenly spaced around the outline and then place a silver forint (or a crown or whatever) in the centre. [...] if everyone is credulous (he may be the strongest sceptic), he concentrates his thoughts in expectation of an interesting phenomenon and, holding his hand horizontally in the air, gently touches the silver disc: sooner or later the forint will begin to move for no reason; and everyone will feel with all his nerves that it moves of its own accord. [...] Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, it moves towards the edge of the circle, towards one of the letters.

In 1903, Sándor Bródy's newspaper Jövendőben published a long article about the old Green Hat, reporting on the enduring popularity of spiritism: "There are many adherents among the upper classes, scientists, artists and Latinists, and there is even a large camp of believers among the lower classes. "Spiritism became a religious substitute for the counts, barons and the increasingly impoverished nobility of post-conquest Hungary," writes Jenő Szigeti, who also describes in her study other important figures of Hungarian spiritism alongside Grünhut-Vay's circle. For example, Titus Tóvölgyi, whose life story once again reveals the connection between leftist ideas and occult teachings - although it would be more accurate to say that Tóvölgyi, who wrote a novel about the Paris Commune, a utopian novel about the future communist society entitled The New World and was imprisoned for this work, reformulated his worldview within the framework of spiritism ideas. Among the spiritists was also Aladar Madách, son of the great playwright, who came into contact with spiritist circles during a trip to England, wrote several books on the subject and collaborated with the aforementioned Baron János Mikos and his newspaper to promote a kind of scientific spiritism.

János Hock, a Catholic priest - his name is perhaps best known from the chronicle of the Grey Rose Revolution - and president of the Hungarian National Council, was also receptive to spiritism and, after his death, dictated a book on the afterlife to a certain Sister Erzsi.

It is also known that many members of the Hungarian literary world - such as Mór Jókai, Géza Gárdonyi, Dezső Kosztolányi, Ferenc Karinthy - participated in table dancing sessions, and György Lukács and Béla Balázs read with great interest one of Helena Blavatsky's spiritist treatises - a book dealing with spiritism - during the First World War.