Phasmophobia - How To Use The Spirit Box

Phasmophobia - How To Use The Spirit Box

Written by 

Sascha Heinisch

Published 

30th Oct 2020 12:12

The Spirit Box in Phasmophobia is one of its most exciting tools to investigate and gather evidence with, due to the freedom which you are allowed to use it with. Given its voice recognition properties, it makes for a thrillingly immersive experience when used right. However, because of its wide range of possibilities, and the broad range of information the team has to gather, it isn’t exactly intuitive to use. When was the last time you tried to talk to a ghost in real life using electronics? Exactly.

No worries though, we’ll walk you through it step by step!

How to use the spirit box in Phasmophobia 

While it isn’t actually necessary to use either the global or local push to talk channels for the ghost to hear you, it’s advised to do so, because it gives your teammates some more information to work with. Just avoid flooding communications.

Set up global and local push to talk in options is easy. Go to Options > Controls and select a key. The standard local Push To Talk button is V, and global is B. Some users may prefer to have these buttons away from only being accessible with your thumb and may want to move them to a key higher up the keyboard. 

Once you’ve picked up the Spirit Box, you may activate it using the Right Mouse Button. You know that the device is switched on when it starts cycling through radio frequencies. “Nothing detected” is also an indicator that the device is working and this message not showing up to any of your questions might indicate that your microphone hasn’t been properly set up. 

With the device switched on, you may start asking questions and depending on the ghost type and your location (and if the game isn’t being too fickle), you may get a response. Keep in mind that you want to be in the room the ghost has been identified to be in, and you want to have the lights switched off, though candles are fine to use. Once it’s on, you can still use it even while it is on the ground.

An example of a use case for the spirit box might be the following. You pick up the spirit box, go to the right room, and ask the question “Where are you?” The ghost may just answer one of several answers depending on its type, such as “Far”, “Away”, “Close”, or even “Behind”. Some questions will give you indicators that the ghost might be starting a hunt soon by giving aggressive answers. 

You can be quite creative in asking for the relevant information to fill your journal. Questions like “Are you old/young/boy/girl/friendly?” work decently well. Requests like “Give us a sign!”, “Show yourself!”, “Speak to us!”, and anything down that line of request may lead to desired evidence being offered up by the spectral subject.

Even getting a response in “Nothing detected” can be valuable information that may lead to a conclusion. At times the ghost will answer just “E” which will indicate that it wants to say “leave” or “here”. 
The beauty of the spirit box is that no real “meta” solution has been found yet, and it’s on the player to find out their personal best way to utilise the tool with the aforementioned basics in mind. Happy ghost hunting!

Image via Kinetic Games

Sascha Heinisch
About the author
Sascha Heinisch
Sascha "Yiska" Heinisch is a Senior Esports Journalist at GGRecon. He's been creating content in esports for over 10 years, starting with Warcraft 3.
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