Hunt survival: hiding, looping, and the three mistakes that get crews killed
Deaths in Phasmophobia feel random. They almost never are. Watch enough contract footage and the same three mistakes appear over and over: reacting late to the warning signs, breaking hiding discipline, and attempting loops on furniture that cannot support them. This guide takes hunts apart phase by phase.
Phase one: the warning signs, and why seconds matter
A hunt does not start when you see the ghost. It starts several seconds earlier, and those seconds are the whole game. The tells are consistent: your flashlight and other electronics begin to flicker and malfunction, the front door and exits lock, and global chat cuts out because the ghost jams radios in range. If you are watching a video camera, its feed distorts.
The correct response to those signals is boring and immediate: kill your light, close your mouth, and move to your pre-chosen spot. Not "finish reading the thermometer." Not "grab the photo camera first." The players who die in the opening seconds of a hunt are almost always the ones who tried to complete one more task after the flicker started.
Rule of thumb: from the moment you enter the building, you should always be able to answer the question "where do I go if a hunt starts right now?" If you cannot answer it, finding an answer is your next task, before evidence, before objectives.
Phase two: hiding discipline
Hiding fails for three reasons, and only one of them is bad luck.
Sound leaks
Most hunting ghosts track noise: your footsteps, thrown or bumped objects, active electronics, and your actual voice over the microphone. Hiding behind a perfect wall while your talkie is live, or while you whisper "is it gone?" to a teammate, is not hiding. Go dark, go quiet, and if your setup uses voice detection, that includes real-world muttering.
Line-of-sight leaks
A hiding spot only works if the ghost never gains line of sight on the way in. Ducking into a closet while the ghost watches you enter converts a safe spot into a coffin. Break line of sight first, around a corner or through a doorway, then commit to the spot. This is also why the best hiding spots are chosen during setup, when you can plan an approach the ghost cannot observe.
Spot quality
Maps distinguish between official hiding places, like closets, lockers, and purpose-built blind corners, and improvised ones like standing behind shelving. Official spots are strong but finite, and on higher difficulties some get blocked. Improvised spots depend entirely on the sound and sight rules above. Learn two or three reliable spots per map wing rather than one per building; hunts rarely start where it is convenient.
Phase three: looping, the skill that replaces hiding
Looping means running controlled circles around a large obstacle, a kitchen island, a dining table, a shelving unit, so the ghost can never close the distance. It is the strongest survival tool in the game and the most misunderstood.
Three fundamentals make loops work:
- Pick furniture with four clean corners. A loopable object must let you change direction without slowing. Anything with a dead end, a chair jutting out, or a gap the ghost can cut through is not loop furniture, it is bait.
- Watch the ghost, not your path. Loops fail when players stare forward and sprint. Keep the ghost on your screen edge, move only enough to hold spacing, and reverse direction the moment it commits to a side. Walking is often enough; panic sprinting drains stamina you may need for the exit.
- Know your ghost's speed profile before you rely on the loop. Standard-speed ghosts loop comfortably. Line-of-sight accelerators get faster the longer they can see you, which punishes long open loops and rewards tight ones that repeatedly break their view. A handful of entities are fast enough that looping without incense is a last resort. This is where identification and survival stop being separate skills.
Incense: the panic button with a timer
Lit incense (smudge sticks) near a hunting ghost blinds it briefly, buying you seconds to break line of sight and relocate. Two habits turn it from a panic item into a system. First, carry it into the building during the phase of the contract when hunts become plausible, not in the truck where it helps no one. Second, count the disorientation out loud when you use it. Different entities recover on meaningfully different timers, and the interval before the next hunt differs too, which means your escape tool doubles as an identification test. An unusually short calm after smudging is a classic community separator for the Demon.
The three mistakes, named
Mistake one: the one-more-task death. The flicker starts and the player finishes placing a sensor. Solution: treat electronics flicker as a fire alarm, not a suggestion.
Mistake two: the talking corpse. Hidden perfectly, killed anyway, because the mic was live. Solution: hunts are silent. All of them. Every time.
Mistake three: the improvised loop. A player tries to loop a couch with a dead end and meets the ghost at the wall. Solution: scout loop furniture during setup, the same way you scout hiding spots, and never trust an object you have not walked around once in peace time.
After the hunt: the all-clear and the reset
Hunts end; panic should end with them. When the lights stabilize and the door unlocks, resist the urge to sprint back to exactly what you were doing. Take ten seconds: confirm the crew is alive, note where the hunt started and how the ghost moved (that is identification data you paid sanity for), and check whether your average sanity now puts you in permanent danger territory. On low sanity, every subsequent hunt comes faster, and the correct play often shifts from "gather more evidence" to "confirm and get out."
If a crew member died, their dropped equipment is recoverable, and the contract is not automatically failed. The calculation just changed: fewer eyes, lower average sanity, and a ghost you now know something about. Plenty of successful identifications happen after a death, precisely because the hunt that killed someone revealed the ghost's speed and tracking behavior to everyone else.
Speed values, detection ranges, and hiding-spot availability are community estimates and change with patches; the 13 Willow Street rework on July 21, 2026 will specifically reshuffle hiding and looping geometry on that map. Re-scout reworked maps before you trust old spots, and check the patch log after updates.