Abstract: In Xu Xu’s 1937 novel Ghostly Love, the female protagonist flaunts her self-claimed identity as a ghost while resisting the human world as well as a union with a man. What is particularly striking is the way that alienation is proclaimed and even somewhat indulged. This paper argues that the novel mediates the anxieties of the global rise of radical politics and figures the historical in Shanghai modernity. By entangling the past with the present and alluding to a disturbing future, it challenges the linear progression of time and highlights the fractured and crippled presence/existence. Furthermore, with the pairing of specter and revolution, it can also be read as a parody of The Communist Manifesto and an exorcism of radical politics. In sum, by intersecting haunting with modernity, femininity, and revolution, the novel engages with the global rise of modernity and radical politics and endows the perils of oppositional politics with renewed urgency.