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How to identify a ghost, and what to do when the evidence is hidden
Seven evidence types, three per ghost — and a method that still works on Nightmare and Insanity, where one or two of them are taken away from you.
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Seven evidence types, three per ghost — and a method that still works on Nightmare and Insanity, where one or two of them are taken away from you.
Every ghost carries three of seven evidence types, and finding all three narrows the journal to exactly one entity. That is the whole game on the lower difficulties. On Nightmare one of those three is hidden from you, on Insanity two are — and from there identification stops being about equipment and becomes about behaviour.
Our ghost database has all thirty entities with their evidence, and it filters by the evidence you have already found: tick off Ghost Writing and you go from thirty candidates to thirteen without reading a list. Keep it open on a phone; this page is the method that tells you what to look for next.
The order matters less than doing each one properly. Most failed contracts are not bad luck — they are one piece of evidence that was never really tested.
| Evidence | How you actually confirm it |
|---|---|
| EMF Level 5 | Read near a door, a light switch or a thrown object right after an interaction. Only all five lights count — level 2 means nothing. |
| Spirit Box | Ghost room, lights off, close enough, and you have to speak. Silence is not a negative until you've asked several times. |
| Ultraviolet | UV light or a glowstick on handles, switches and light switches after interactions. Salt piles turn footsteps into fingerprints you can find later. |
| Ghost Writing | Open book, flat surface, in the ghost room, then leave it alone. A ghost that writes tries roughly every minute or so. |
| Freezing Temperatures | A number below 0 °C on the thermometer. Seeing your breath is a hint, not the evidence. |
| D.O.T.S. Projector | On the floor, aimed across open space, and watched — either directly or on a camera feed. |
| Ghost Orbs | Only through a camera. They do not exist to the naked eye, so a dark room and a video feed or the truck monitor. |
Two of these fail silently, and they are the two that ruin runs. Freezing gets called on visible breath, which appears above zero. Ghost Orbs get called absent by someone who stood in the room and looked around, which is not how orbs work.
At the difficulties that hide evidence, three ghosts still leave one behind for you, and knowing them is worth more than any chart:
The database marks these in a column of their own, so you can see at a glance which entity is still giving you something on Insanity.
On Nightmare and Insanity, treat the missing evidence as a fact about the contract, not the ghost — two confirmed pieces plus one blank still narrows the list hard. Then you test behaviour, and there are three things worth testing in this order:
Hunt speed is the most reliable tell in the game. Plenty of ghosts share evidence; very few move the same way. A Revenant crawls until it sees you and then sprints — if a hunt starts slow and turns terrifying, you are almost done. A Hantu speeds up in cold rooms and slows down in warm ones, which is a thing you can deliberately test by moving.
Sanity thresholds are the second lever: most ghosts start hunting around half sanity, and the ones that don't announce themselves by hunting when they shouldn't. A hunt at very high sanity is information, not bad luck.
Ability triggers are the third: a light switch that will not turn on, a photograph that makes the ghost vanish, an appearance that shouldn't have happened. Each of these belongs to a short list of entities.
⚠️ One number worth not trusting: the exact sanity percentage at which a given ghost hunts is quoted differently across sources, and the differences are large enough to get someone killed. Use the shape of the behaviour — «it hunted much earlier than it should have» — rather than a threshold you read somewhere.
If you die anyway, the thing worth knowing before the next contract is what you actually lose — it's less than most people assume.