Phasmophobia Banshee: It Ignores Team Sanity

Most Phasmophobia ghosts decide when to hunt by the average sanity of the whole team, which means a hunt is a team problem with a team solution — keep everyone’s sanity up. The Banshee breaks that rule, and the break is the single most common reason a team gets picked off one by one while insisting “our sanity is fine.” This page explains the Banshee’s target-based hunt logic.

The core difference

The Banshee locks onto one player at a time as its target and reads only that player’s sanity when deciding to hunt. If the target’s sanity is low, the Banshee can hunt even though the team average is high. That is why a team can be at 80% average and still get hunted: the ghost is watching the one member who dropped.

The trap in practice

A typical Banshee death looks like this: one player explores alone, their sanity dips, and the Banshee hunts them specifically. The rest of the team, seeing a healthy average, assumes no hunt is possible and gets caught flat-footed when the targeted member dies and the 15% sanity hit from that death ripples through everyone.

How to spot and survive it

• Watch individual sanity, not just the average, when someone is isolated.
• The Banshee also sings more often and is female-only in its model, both secondary tells.
• Keep the targeted player topped up with pills and near the group so a hunt is a shared problem, not a solo ambush.
• On the hunt threshold page the Banshee is the clearest example of why the average-sanity rule has exceptions.

Why this matters for identification

On Nightmare and Insanity, where evidence is hidden, a hunt that ignores the team average is itself a strong Banshee signal — pair it with the identification order guide and the evidence types reference to close the case. The ghost count page confirms the Banshee is one of the 30 types where this behavior lives.