Wow you out-wrote me here :)
Movement (and camera) is HARD. I half-failed there too even if I played around a month before the jam started and tried to get things pretty good.
I guess one relatively easy way to increase likelihood of players interacting with the apparitions would be a textprompt when facing them. Redesigning them to be less abstract and more humanoid ghost-like could be another. Finally if you want to give the player character a voice you could have a reaction event trigger if the player enters the area of one and hasn’t yet interacted with any. That when they leave the area the player character could say something like “What was that thing?”
I agree that showing enemies can be effective, and in particular if you feel like and they are in fact hunting you. But you also have a risk of players starting to play the map rather than the 3D world. And it also comes back what makes sense in the game world and with its logic. No easy answers for sure.
I agree with the struggles of the current AI, it’s probably best as you did to keep it simple and space out the encounters.