Zombies, ghosts and monsters proliferate as metaphors for living and working in times where social stability is perceived as being under threat. Such metaphors give shape to anxieties and fears; they figure a social process that no longer serves rationalized ends, but has taken on a strange and sinister life of its own. This paper analyses vignettes from recent Australian research to consider how subjectivities are haunted and/or become monstrous in their negotiation of the losses, absences and dehumanizing practices to which neoliberal education reforms give rise (e.g. Whelan, Walker & Moore, 2013). Informed by feminist, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories of haunting and horror (Certeau, 2002; Gordon, 2008; Kristeva, 1982), we argue that education’s un/dead are complicit in the tethering of meaningful teaching and learning to instrumentalist rationalities. References: Certeau, M. d. (2002) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press Gordon, A. (2008) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Kristeva, J. (1982) The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press Whelan, A., Walker, R. and Moore, C. (Eds.) (2013) Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education. University of Chicago Press