This chapter looks at the role of literature in the conflict between science, religion, and occultism that marked the late nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, when the re-emergence of occult disciplines and practices, such as mesmerism and spiritualism, cast doubt on traditional Christian values and encouraged many scientists, most notably Cesare Lombroso, to examine, through a rigorously empirical approach, such occult phenomena. Through an exploration of the wide spectrum of interactions between detection, which epitomizes progress and the force of reason, and the destabilizing element of the supernatural, this chapter aims to demonstrate that the progressive secularization of crime and punishment did not imply a full and organic transition from a model of authority ruled by providence to one ruled by science. By probing the way in which the supernatural in literature was first absorbed into and framed by Christian narratives of crime and punishment, then rejected or deconstructed, and finally re-incorporated into the rational world, the chapter shows how the spectre of the supernatural continued to loom large over the country and constituted an obstacle to its labourious process of modernization.