Phasmophobia: the revamped 13 Willow Street guide — 8 hiding spots, cursed possessions, and the Soul of an Artist challenge

The overhaul of 13 Willow Street arrived on July 21, 2026 with version 0.18.0.0 of Phasmophobia, alongside the Deildegast and the year's first quality-of-life update. Three weeks of contracts later, the verdict is clear: the house still plays the same way, but every visual landmark needs to be relearned.

Willow remains the map of choice for chaining together short investigations: ten rooms in total, one ground floor, one basement, a single entrance. It's above all the map with the smallest possible number of haunted rooms in the game, which massively shortens the search for the entity's room. And since the overhaul, it has its own permanent challenge on the lobby's event board: The Artists' Den, which unlocks the Soul of an Artist badge and ID card.

What the July 21 overhaul changed

Kinetic Games is applying to Willow the same method already used on 6 Tanglewood Drive back in March: the overall layout is kept, a few rooms are reassigned, the flow between them is tweaked, but the modeling is entirely redone. No movement habits are broken; however, the room you used to identify at a glance by its furniture no longer looks anything like it used to.

The chosen theme is cats. The feline props already existed — they're dedicated to cjdxn's cat, who passed away before the release of 0.7.0 — but they're now put front and center: a cat tree and wall shelves in the living room, a cat cave in the master bedroom, a climbing wall in the gym. These aren't neutral set pieces: they're your new landmarks when the lights go out.

The ten rooms to know

The house unlocks at level 6 and has ten rooms, seven on the ground floor and three in the basement:

• Ground floor: Living Room, Kitchen, Hallway, Bathroom, Master Bedroom, Gym, and Studio (the painting studio).
• Basement: Basement Living Room, Basement Bar, and Basement Utility.

The French-language wiki, which reuses the in-game text, leaves these room names in English, just like the map names.

These ten rooms are also the ten possible haunted rooms, the lowest total in the game. On a large map, the search for the entity's room takes up most of the contract time; here, two trips back and forth with the thermometer are usually enough. Only two rooms allow the entity to change floors during a short wander: the Hallway and the Basement Utility. If you lose track of it, these are the two passages to watch.

One last mechanical detail: the game almost systematically merges a small attached bathroom with the room it's connected to. So treat the bathroom next to the Gym as part of the Gym: for both the crucifix and ghost orbs, the entity can manifest in either half.

The Artists' Den challenge and the Soul of an Artist set

This is the real new content tied to the map, and it flew under the radar for French-speaking players. Like every reworked map, Willow received its permanent challenge on the lobby's event board.

• Name: The Artists' Den.
• Condition: identify the entity 50 times and survive, on any difficulty, at 13 Willow Street.
• Reward: the badge and the Soul of an Artist ID card.

"Any difficulty" is the key: nothing requires going up to Professional or Nightmare. The counter progresses the same way on Amateur, where all eight hiding spots are available and insurance refunds half the equipment cost. Survival, on the other hand, is mandatory: identifying correctly and then dying before reaching the door doesn't count. Head out as soon as the identification is locked in the journal, without going after that one extra photo.

6 Tanglewood Drive has had its own since March — Terror at Tanglewood, which grants the Real Estate Agent set — for the same amount of effort. Since these two suburban houses are the fastest in the game, they're the two challenges to tackle first if you're aiming for the badge collection.

A word on the Cool Cat rewards tied to the release: they were obtained through Twitch Drops limited to July 21–28. That window is closed, and the animated version was reserved for channels partnered with Kinetic Games.

The eight hiding spots — and how many are actually left

Willow is known as a dangerous map during hunts, and that's not just a feeling: there's no locker, no slatted closet like the one at Tanglewood where you can watch the entity without being seen. Here, hiding means crouching behind a piece of furniture. The eight spots recognized by the game:

• Living Room: behind the wooden screen, in the corner near the kitchen doors.
• Kitchen: the closet.
• Gym: inside the shower, when a door allows it to be closed.
• Studio: behind the painting set on the easel, in the corner near the shelf.
• Master Bedroom: behind the wooden screen.
• Master Bedroom: inside the built-in wardrobe.
• Basement Bar: the space under the stairs.
• Basement Utility: behind the stacked black storage bins.

The catch is that this number of eight only applies on Amateur. The higher the difficulty, the more the game clutters these spots or removes the element that conceals you:

Just one usable hiding spot in the entire house on Nightmare and Insanity, and you won't know which one until you go check: that's what makes Willow so hostile on high difficulty. Multiplayer compensates a bit, since the game reopens one hiding spot with three players and two with four players — unless the hiding spots option is set to "None" in custom difficulty, in which case this bonus disappears too.

The consequence is simple: past Intermediate, scout your hiding spot during the setup phase, before bringing out the equipment. If none is available on your half of the house, switch to plan B, the loop: the dining table and the living room sofa are open enough to circle around without getting cornered.

A detail missing from most guides published in the wake of the rework: the v0.18.0.1 patch from July 28 removed a bug that let the entity enter several of Willow's hiding spots — the same patch applies to Tanglewood, 42 Edgefield Road and 10 Ridgeview Court. If you tested the map the week it launched and concluded that hiding spots were useless, that test no longer holds.

Where the seven cursed possessions spawn

The rework redistributed the spawn spots. Reminder of the rule: on all default difficulties except Insanity, only one cursed possession is rolled per contract, and each object has a dedicated, fixed spawn location on a given map. On Willow, they're scattered throughout the house.

Five of the seven spots are on the ground floor, two in the basement: a Kitchen → Living Room → Studio → Master Bedroom → Gym loop covers the first five in under a minute, and if nothing appears, the contract's object is downstairs. Photograph it before touching it: up to $7 and 7 XP, whether you use it or not.

Circuit breaker, lights and temperature

Since Willow is a small map, the circuit breaker supports nine light sources turned on at most. With such open rooms and the rework's generous lighting, that limit gets hit fast: beyond it, everything trips at once and the switches flip back to off. Turn off lights behind you in rooms you've already cleared.

Its location is shown on the site map in the truck, except on Nightmare and Insanity, where you have to find it yourself. Also remember that the circuit breaker controls temperature: with power on, the interior slowly climbs back toward 20°C; with it off, it drops back down toward the ambient temperature tied to the weather. If you suspect Freezing Temperatures and the thermometer is stuck, cut the power and let the house cool down while you work on another piece of evidence.

The typical contract on Willow

The house has only one exit, the front door, opened with the entry key. That's its weak point: during a hunt, no back door will save you, and if the entity cuts you off from the Hallway from the basement, all that's left are hiding spots and the loop. Head back upstairs as soon as a ghost event triggers downstairs.

Otherwise, the investigation comes down to three steps: concentrate the evidence-gathering equipment on the two or three most active rooms rather than spreading a single item across every room; confirm the haunted room with the thermometer and the EMF reader, very quick here; then make the most of the contract in media before heading back out. Finally, note that there are only three water sources: against a Deogen, sinks are among the objects that slow it down, but you'll mainly need to rely on switches and interactable objects.

Should you learn Willow now?

Yes, for scheduling reasons. As of August 10, the second quality-of-life update announced for this month still hasn't been released: Kinetic Games' last update remains the July 28 patch. The roadmap then places Unity 6 in October, the player character overhaul in November, and the 42 Edgefield Road rework at the end of the year. Willow will therefore remain the most recent map for several months, with a brand new permanent challenge to complete. Fifty identifications on Amateur on the smallest house in the roster amounts to a few evenings — much less than an equivalent challenge on Sunny Meadows.