Situated at the intersection of the history of science and medicine and the history of bodies, this article investigates the lives of the dead in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century India. By the late nineteenth century, the dead moved into the socio-material landscape of the ‘sanitary city’ of Calcutta via crematoriums, burning ghats, dissecting theatres, and anatomy labs. Subsequently, one notices two new developments. On the one hand, Calcutta witnessed the rise of pathological anatomy, whereby the dead drifted into biology. On the other hand, massive mortalities triggered by disease and the paranoia of death in rural Bengal spurred the proliferation of ghost stories. In understanding attitudes toward death, occult, spiritualism, mesmerism, and the unexplained, can ‘unreason’ be a useful framework to comprehend the past? Drawing on the colonial archive of municipal reports and vernacular archive of fiction to the activities of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and the Theosophical Society in Adyar, I examine how the two stories—the urban, anatomical, reasoned science and the spectral ‘irrational’ fantasies—often coexisted as the dead moved from hospital beds to dissecting tables to spiritualist awakenings and horror tales. I argue that in this web of entanglement between the living and the dead, between ‘scientific’ culture and the phantasmagorical ethos, and in the liminal boundaries between positivism/passion, and surgery/mesmerism, we witness the birth of a new affect-laden sensibility in British Bengal.