Stories about ghosts or supernatural occurrences are also part of Finnish folklore and storytelling tradition. Stories about ghostly things have always been told in a culturally specific way. These include apparitions of the dead, crosses in the sky, knocking, rattling and angelic apparitions. These apparitions were described as spontaneous phenomena that were not caused by an attempt to induce them. It was not until the modern spiritist movement, modern American spiritism, defined the connection with the spirit world as a phenomenon, organised itself into churches and organisations and formulated its own spiritist philosophy. It was no longer just a matter of striking spirits, but of a certain interpretation of supernatural phenomena.

Already in the early 19th century, the enlightened writer Jaakko Juteini (1781-1855) explained what were considered supernatural phenomena in a natural way. According to him, a phenomenon considered haunting or supernatural can be explained in a natural way if a greater effort is made to investigate it. Ghost phenomena were generally considered negative. The apparition of the deceased at the moment of death is a fairly common experience, as later sightings have shown. Today, anomalous experiences are interpreted without much mysticism and are even considered normal experiences that people often have. These experiences can be reported, although the stigmatisation may frighten the narrators. Modern spiritism has thus conceptualised the phenomenon of haunting and embraced previously unexplained haunting and necromancy experiences.

The historical roots of Finnish spiritism are to be found in Sweden-Finland, the United States and the United Kingdom. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish mystic and well-known natural scientist of his time, believed that one life leads to another. In Swedenborg's visions, the secrets of heaven opened before his eyes: angels hovered on other planes, and spirits of various stages of development inhabited an otherworldly reality. The other reality was, at least theoretically, perceptible in these supernatural visions and abnormal states of consciousness. Swedenborg's Heaven, its Wonders and Hell was published in Latin in London in 1758. It was soon translated into English and reached a wide readership, making it Swedenborg's most widely read work today. In his books, Swedenborg describes his visions of the afterlife. However, Swedenborgians or followers of Swedenborg believe that there will be no further revelations, unlike spiritists who believe that revelation is continuous.

In his books, Swedenborg writes about angels who are human spirits. In his opinion, heavenly happiness is not based on inactivity, but on an active life. The life of angels consists in doing good deeds out of love for one's neighbour. God wants good deeds, not just praise and thanks. Heaven and hell are different states for different people, depending on what they have done for others on earth. In other words, there are countless variations and gradations, and for no one heaven and hell are exactly the same or static. Furthermore, according to Swedenborg, people cannot be saved by immediate grace, because then there would be no hell. He writes: "Therefore, it is contrary to his divinity to say that he can save and does not save everyone immediately". Swedenborg's God wants the salvation of all and not the damnation of no one. In Lutheranism, Swedenborg's views were quite radical in his time.

In Finnish spiritist societies, spiritism is understood as a doctrine of spirituality. It is a universal view of life. The modern form of spiritism emerged in Finland in the 1940s, about a hundred years after the emergence of the international spiritist movement. In Finland there are no spiritism congregations or churches, but the field is organised by independent associations, the former local branches of the Finnish Spiritualist Society. The spiritist philosophy of the associations operating in Finland, nine of which are Finnish-speaking and one Swedish-speaking, comprises seven principles, the core of which is the belief that life continues immediately after physical death, since the human being is considered a spirit whose development is eternal. In Finland, the movement adopted its principles from a doctrine formulated by the non-church-ordered English National Union of Spiritists (SNU).

Within a few years, spiritism spread throughout Europe, including England and France. Domestic circles were created in which a suitable member of the family, usually the teenage daughter or mother of the family, acted as a medium. In this way, women were given religious action and status, as well as authority through supposed spirits. However, this authority was illusory, as it was believed to be the spirits who spoke and even taught religious philosophy. The practice declined with the turn of the century as trance and stage mediums became increasingly implicated in frauds. The World Wars revived spiritism in Europe and North America as people tried to contact loved ones.

In the early 20th century, some spiritism literature was published in English, such as the book Raymond or the Challenge from Beyond the Grave (1916, translated in 1922) by the British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), which is about his son who died in the war and his spiritistic practice. At the beginning of the 20th century, spiritism was not only a mourning culture for a certain group of people, but also a kind of umbrella term for everything supernatural. In spiritism séances, mediums transmit messages from the dead to the living or from spirit beings to people. The messages are said to contain information about the life of the deceased and its details, as well as describing the gestures and appearance of the supposed messenger. The spiritist séances were documented in the aforementioned book Raymond, or Interviews from Beyond the Grave.

As early as 1909-1913 there were small-scale spiritism activities in Finland, in the Finnish Spiritualist Society. The society was inspired by the spiritism magazine published by Jalo Kivi and formed the first spiritism movement in Finland. Spiritisti was a spiritist magazine dealing with spiritism and related psychological issues. It contained, among other things, editor's writings and translation articles. The financial difficulties of the Kivi family and the World War interrupted this work. According to Juuso Järvenpää, Kivi played an important role in the early organisation of Finnish spiritism. It was the writer and translator Helmi Krohn (1871-1967) who brought the idea of spiritism from England to Finland in the 1920s and, together with Gerda Ryt, began to translate foreign-language literature into Finnish.

At the same time, a vocabulary for this field was developed. Helmi Krohn founded the Helsinki Spiritist Society in 1946. The Finnish Spiritist Society was registered in 1948. From the 1970s onwards, local groups were founded from Helsinki to Rovaniemi. Krohn did not become interested in spiritism until late in life. At the International Spiritism Congress in Glasgow in 1937, friends Helmi Krohn and Gerda Ryti, wife of Risto Ryti (President of Finland from 1940 to 1944), said they had received messages from deceased people who had been dear to them on Earth.

Krohn tells Turun Sanomat that these messages came through a medium and her spirit guide, her companions. The mediums were often in a trance, in a state of hibernation. The messages were also received in Finnish, he says. The spirit also materialised before Helmi Krohn's own eyes. The first Finnish translation in the field of spiritism was the two-volume book Yhteydessä Yhteydessä mit Geistimaailman (1937), written by Johannes Greber, a Catholic priest turned spiritist. Greber had resigned his priesthood in the Catholic Church because of his spiritist experiments.

It was also known as the table dance, in which the tables turned, moved and danced and sometimes even spoke, i.e. conveyed intelligent messages by tapping on them when lightly touched. However, according to Komulainen, spiritists were not yet organised in Finland at that time. The press occasionally reported phenomena that were considered spiritism. The pöytätanssi was not a marginal phenomenon in Finland, as the press once compared it to a widespread cholera epidemic. Table dancing took place in both rural and urban areas. Spiritism was not only a philosophy and a religion, but also an attempt to explain what was at that time thought or perceived as scientific.

The aim was to prove or demonstrate the immortality of the human soul, albeit through mediumship. Mediums acted as intermediaries between the living and the dead. Spiritists believed that mediums attested to the existence of the spirit world by providing detailed information about the deceased. These were things that mediums should not or could not know. The information could not necessarily be explained telepathically, that is, through thought transmissions.