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Dominant in the second half of the 19th century, realism was a literary movement whose representatives devoted close attention to the quotidian particulars of a social world caught up in the transformations of modernity. Its German-language variants were often intensely local, portraying regional forms of life (in Westphalia, the Austrian and Swiss countryside, Frisia, Berlin and Brandenburg) with a richness of detail approaching that of ethnographic descriptions. Far from confining themselves to giving literal-minded inventories of observable facts, these authors portrayed social worlds haunted by intangible powers: ghosts, historical memories, and vestiges of religious experience in an increasingly secular world. We will explore this duality of local and spectral features in the works of Droste-Hülshoff, Stifter, Keller, Storm, and Fontane.