How do I play against Spirit?

Throw down the pallet and let the spirit mindgame herself. I've stood completely still, already accepting my imminent death, and watched a spirit mindgame herself for a good 30 seconds.

She would phase walk, I'd stand still, then she'd still be on the other side of the pallet lol

There's quite a bit you can do, contrary to popular belief. Most people haven't put in the time.

She has a specific tell in her animation when she begins to phase. Her left arm snaps up to her chest. It's the only time her left arm does that specific motion. It's not the shards. It's her left arm.

Iron Will won't do much of anything against a really high level Spirit. They'll hear your breathing regardless through headphones and an equalizer.

Crouching reduces your regular breathing sounds by half. When you hear the phase sound, you can stop moving and crouch. Just make sure you aren't crouching right where your scratch marks end.

Watch your step around grass or corn. Don't give her easy phases.

You can bait her into committing to one side of a pallet or window when injured when you understand the timing and proximity relative her phasing audio. It gets louder as she gets closer. It's less of a 50/50 if you wait on one side of the pallet/window making all the noise in the world and at the last split second drop it/vault from the other side. This takes practice and repetition to get the timing down.

Overall: make distance>be patient until you're confident she's phasing>burn as much of her phase as you can then force her to commit on a 50/50. That's why making distance initially is key. She's more likely to be wrong when she has to make decisions in a time crunch towards the end of her phase. Don't let the Spirit sit there and listen closely through an entire phase from 6 meters away. And we know how to prevent that because of the arm motion.

Avoid chases, even a rather mediocre spirit will always win in a chase.

Don't enjoy stealting and evading? Well that's just too bad because the other option is getting hooked (and most likely tunneled)

If the Spirit is competent, you lose. Her power assures that if she missed you, it was due to her own mistakes and your actions have little relevancy to the outcome. A good Spirit will phase and track you with Stridor along with other clues such as breathing, footsteps (especially in the swamps), bloodstains if they have proper addons, etc. If she has any kind of doubt of your position, she can just cancel the phasing and recover her power to start a new hunt. Knowing when the phasing started is just the first part of the problem, the second (and bigger IMO) is her position during it. Right now the only clues you have are her footsteps and unlike Good Spirit players that make use of Headphones + Equalizers, they're quite hard to identify. Until the devs introduce a real counterplay, she will remain one of the most unfun killers to play against.

Spirit is... tricky. She's very not transparent to survivors, so a lot is guessing which can obviously lead to you dying.

Now, some perks can help give you an edge. Iron Will will silence you when injured, and if she has Stridor, you're at least muffled (and nearly inaudible if crouching). If you have Spine Chill, you'll always know if she's looking at you, even if phasing.

But let's say you don't have these. If you see a Spirit suddenly stand still as you're running away, try dashing towards a building or tree or ANYTHING to break LoS in case she's tricking you. If she still hasn't moved, walk or double back because by then, she's going to be on your tail.

If you're at a tile, one trick is to drop a pallet and then just hold W away, maybe with some double backs or weird movements thrown in. Remember, before she can use her ears to track you down, she has to rely on scratch marks and visual cues (ex: grass moving) so be on constant alert of what you're doing and where you're going.

I need to make this clear: While I don't dislike Spirit, even I can admit that the sheer lack of transparency is pretty ridiculous. Because of it, nothing I or anyone else can tell you is 100% a good counter. What I've done is given you some common jukes to help fool her, but in the end, if she sees it coming, you're boned.

If you are healthy: Mindgame as hard as you can, dance with her, vault a pallet/window and then slow vault it. Basically try to be as unpredictable as possible.

If you are injured with Iron Will: If she does not have Stridor, repeat same steps as above

If you are injured without Iron Will: Pray it's not a good spirit. May the entity help you, for no one else can.

Even iron will is useless since most run stridor lol

I love when people say that you have to "adapt", "git gud", "learn to outplay". But in reality, you can't do anything unless you do something stupidly unpredictible, then you will maybe have a chance to survive till her ability recharges again or when she will focking passive phase and cut your loop short, because you were not able to see her for 0.5 seconds.

Or just don't have an Iron Will and you will be downed on her first ability use.

There is only one outcome.

Alt + F4

Flip a coin. Call it before it lands. If you guessed right, you might "mindgame" her. If not, she "mindgames" you.

Seriously though, if you can somehow watch the Spirit play, you might see trends in their playstyle, and can use that against them. However, that suggests you can sit there and study the Killer while they murderface your team, which is obviously not a viable option most of the time. Still, you might notice that say, at a pallet, the Spirit player always shifts and gets behind it. This can let you predict their actions at the next pallet. However, most Spirit players mix up how they approach pallets and loops, making it much harder to find any kind of pattern you can use.

A vocal minority of players like to insist that Spirit is fine and has counterplay. She's not fine, and she barely has counterplay. Calling a coin flip is random luck, with tons of math behind it to say "it's not technically random". Spirit is the same. It's technically NOT random, and playing against her has theory behind it, but you would need an absolute galaxy brain and knowledge of the players history from the moment they were born to the moment you play against them to absolutely know what they are going to do when you can't see them. She offers very little reactionary gameplay, and all you can do when you think she is phasing is breakdance like a maniac to throw her off when she pops out for scary "boo" time.

Furthermore, a vocal minority insists she has some kind of tiny visual cue to let you know when she is phasing. If there is ANYTHING, which I would honestly say there mostly isn't, the little she DOES have is so minor it's almost inconsequential. A tiny little glow on her shards, a twitch in her arm, her nose hairs get slightly longer, whatever. They are so minor and hard to really spot during a real chase that they don't matter. Compare that to every other Killer in the game that very openly broadcast what they are doing. ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS. She DOES have an audio cue... if you're nowhere near her. It feels pretty backwards.

She's a rather simple Killer to play that offers the Survivor team very little counterplay. What little counterplay there is gets boiled down to "luck" really fast.

Oh, ya, you can stealth around her too. It works sometimes. Enjoy that.