An archaeology of ghost phenomena in philosophy, literature, spiritualist research, and new media from the 18th to the early 20th century. When Kant was writing a treatise on true and false ghost-seeing, showmen used the magic lantern to scare their audience with projected ghosts. The ambivalence towards ghosts remained formative for Kant. In his critical texts, the philosopher then incorporates the spiritualist concept of the appearance of a supernatural thing. At the same time, he equates the deception of speculative reason with the illusion of the magic lantern. Thus, the optical medium becomes an epistemic figure for the limits of philosophical knowledge. It is such constellations that Stefan Andriopoulos explores, examining Kant and Hegel, Schiller and Schopenhauer, in the literature of Romanticism.