This article focuses on the Shanghai Spiritualism Society, which was founded in 1917 by Yu Fu, Lu Feikuei, Ding Fubao, Yang Xuan, and Yan Fu and which published The Journal of Spiritualism (1918-20), in order to explore the origins and development of spiritualist study in early Republican China. The study of spiritualism—including such topics as the souls, deities, ghosts, spirit photography, life, and death—flourished in Shanghai during the early twentieth century. It was a new, vibrant phenomenon and soon became a form of knowledge or a set of skills that could be purchased or consumed through the medium of newspaper advertisements and in the organizational form of “society.” The study of spiritualism on the one hand derived from fuji (to write in sand with a stick as a form of planchette) originating from ancient China, and, on the other hand, was influenced by Western and Japanese psychical research, mesmerism, demonology, and mentalism. Twentieth-century spiritualism in Shanghai thus illustrates the negotiations between the East and the West, old and new, metaphysics (or religion) and science, elite culture and popular culture, as well as urban and rural. Past studies have regarded spiritualism as superstition or anti-science. This article tries to avoid this clear-cut evaluation and emphasizes adopting descriptive and analytical methods to clarify the origin, significance, and limitations of the study of spiritualism in Shanghai in the 1910s and ’20s.