While not entirely a "soft lock" in the actual term it does make it really hard to recover from early mistakes. When I was first starting the game I was getting caught quite a bit as I was finding out controls and tools even with the guide screen. After a little while I found myself with little funds to purchase equipment like the incense to get out of those precarious situations. It gets a bit more tricky as I found the ghost can see you enter a hiding spot from across the long hallways where you cannot see the ghost. This makes it a bit tricky to dash into the closet in the entry hall and if close behind you it can easily trap you in the bedroom, living room, and garage where it could be a bit difficult to get to those hiding places before the ghost enters the room.
It didn't take me too long to learn the patterns of the current limited number of ghosts to the point I had everything found out within a minute and could catch them in the first hunt so I am no longer having that issue, but it did make it quite difficult to recover. Also at the time of writing I failed to catch that the game literally tells you what the ghost is after the first time it catches you so you could just take that information and run to at least get the 100 cash on mission completion. So I guess that's just a little hint for the idiots like me who overspend and need some cash to recover their losses.