Evidence on Nightmare and Insanity: How Many Clues

The hardest part of high-difficulty Phasmophobia is not the ghosts — it is that the game stops giving you the evidence you need to identify them. If you have only ever played Amateur or Professional, the evidence reduction on Nightmare and Insanity will feel like the journal is broken. This page explains exactly how many clues each difficulty grants.

How many evidence types per difficulty

• Amateur, Intermediate, Professional — all three evidence types are obtainable.
• Nightmare — only two are available; one is randomly hidden. Certain ghosts guarantee specific evidence even here.
• Insanity — only one evidence type is available.
• Custom — configurable from zero to three, with the option to hide specific types.
• Training — behaves like the lower tiers for evidence but is a tutorial mode.

Why this breaks naive identification

On Professional you can usually tick three clues and let the journal name the ghost. On Nightmare you get two, and on Insanity you get one. That means the journal can no longer narrow the list to a single name — you are left with several candidates that share your visible clue, and you must separate them by behavior.

Behavior becomes the ID method

When evidence is short, the tells that matter are hunt speed, sanity thresholds (see the hunt threshold page), and unique abilities. The Mimic and Obake are the classic traps here — the Mimic, Obake, Deildegast page explains how they lie to you when evidence is scarce.

Practical approach

On Nightmare and Insanity, lead with the evidence types you can still get, then move to the identification order guide for the behavior tests that close the gap. And remember the ghost count is still 30 — fewer clues does not mean fewer ghosts, just a harder sort.

Elimination order matters more than any test

With evidence reduced, the contract stops being a checklist and becomes a process of elimination, and the order you eliminate in matters more than any single test. Start with the observations that split the roster in half rather than the ones that are convenient: behaviour only a handful of ghosts share is worth more than a clue half the list could produce. Write the candidates down and cross them off, because with fewer clues the reasoning has to survive several steps and memory will not hold it. The identification order page is built for exactly this, and how many ghosts gives you the roster to work against.