The Monkey Paw in Phasmophobia is one of the game’s most powerful and risky-to-use cursed objects. While all the cursed possessions in Phasmophobia have some sort of negative effects, the benefits often outweigh the negatives, and some will only drain your sanity level as long as they’re used cautiously and correctly. However, using the Monkey Paw to make a wish can be very helpful to your investigation–offering the ability to change the weather, increase your sanity level, trap the ghost, and even revive a dead player–doing so always has negative consequences.
While some of the Monkey Paw’s negative effects are temporary, others last throughout the current contract, and can include obscured vision, muffled hearing, and even straight-up death. So make sure to weigh up if using it is really worth it and remember that each wish can only be used once, so don’t waste them.
To use the paw, simply pick it up and make a wish–starting your sentence with “I wish…”– or, if you’re using the text-based UI, press your use button and choose the wish you want to make. If you find that the paw is struggling to understand you, or you don’t have a mic available, it’s worth changing your voice recognition mode to ‘Text’ under game options, so you can still use the Monkey Paw. When a wish is successful, a finger on the paw will curl closed. If the fingers don’t move, the paw likely hasn’t registered your voice, and if a finger twitches but doesn’t curl, then the wish isn’t valid. Below are all the Monkey Paw wishes in Phasmophobia and their effects.
All Monkey Paw ghost wishes and effects
“I wish to see the ghost”
Triggers a summoning ghost event (like the Summoning Circle) that makes the ghost appear in full form in its current room, but locks the exit doors. The ghost starts a cursed hunt–during which your vision is obscured–five seconds after the summon.
“I wish for activity”
Ghost activity is doubled for two minutes, but locks exit doors for two minutes and permanently breaks the fuse box/breaker.
