In philosophy as well as in literature and in the visual arts, phantoms are discussed mostly as precarious phenomena: they deceive the human senses, haunt places and human beings alike – and they suddenly appear and disappear, only to reappear again. What makes them interesting for a media-theoretical approach is, however, not only the frequency and intensity of their repetitive apparition, but also the productivity of the uncanny recurrence itself. In my talk I will grasp Jacques Derrida’s notion of a spectrology revealing the strange productivity of phantoms. In doing so I will focus on the materiality of mummies, photographs and films, whose histories as ‘phantom’ matter are intertwined.