He sought to become a captain in the Polish Navy, but as a Jew was told to forget it. “I decided to become a zoologist and traveled to exotic countries in Africa,” Mr. Imich recalled. But blocked from advancement, he switched to chemistry, earning a doctorate at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

In the early 1930s, Mr. Imich grew fascinated with a Polish medium who was known as Matylda S., a doctor’s widow gaining renown for séances that reportedly called up the dead. He participated in numerous inexplicable encounters that he detailed in a German scholarly journal in 1932 and recounted in an anthology he edited, “Incredible Tales of the Paranormal,” published by Bramble Books in 1995.

He keeps a box of forks and spoons twisted in macropsychokinesis experiments. “I watched ordinary people doing that,” he said, although he himself was unable to duplicate it.

He married a childhood sweetheart who a few years later left him for another man, whereupon he married her friend, Wela. When the Nazis overran Poland in 1939, they fled east to Soviet-occupied Bialystok. Refusing to accept Soviet nationality, they were shipped to a labor camp.

With Russia reeling under German attack, they were freed and moved to Samarkand, a city in Central Asia, in what is now Uzbekistan, and then back to Poland. There they found that many family members had died in the Holocaust.

In 1951 they immigrated to Waterbury, Conn. Wela Imich, a painter and psychotherapist, opened a practice in Manhattan. After she died in 1986, Mr. Imich moved into her suite in a prewar apartment hotel at 305 West End Avenue. Eight years later it was turned into the Esplanade, a luxury senior residence, and he was grandfathered in. His savings vanished in dubious investments, and The New York Times Neediest Cases campaign came to his aid in 2007.

So what are his secrets of longevity?

He and his wife never had children. That might have helped, he guessed. (His closest relative is an 84-year-old nephew.)