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Teens terrorizing themselves with #CharlieCharlieChallenge and filming the results

Teens terrorizing themselves with #CharlieCharlieChallenge and filming the results

Move over Ouija boards and “Bloody Mary.” There’s a new creepy game in town, and it involves a sombrero-wearing demon named Charlie.

Teens everywhere are convinced they’ve been able to summon a Mexican demon named Charlie through a new Ouija board-inspired game called the Charlie Charlie Challenge.

According to TIME, this is how the game, a supposed “ancient tradition” — the BBC debunked the challenge’s rumoured history here, while the Washington Post linked the game to a generations-old schoolyard game in Spain — is played:

“The game is simple: draw a grid on a piece of paper with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the boxes, balance one pencil on top of another in the shape of a cross, and ask something along the lines of ‘Charlie, Charlie are you here?’ or ‘Charlie, Charlie can we play?’ Then watch as the pencil moves and proceed to scream, etc. For viral fun, film yourself doing this and share the result.”

“Hundreds of people have reported moving furniture and spooky sounds after summoning the sombrero-wearing spirit,” the Manchester Evening News reported.

(Fun fact: According to game legend, if participants fail to send Charlie back to the afterlife, he’ll haunt them long after they’re done playing it.)

Neil Dagnall, principal lecturer in psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, believes the craze, which took off on Twitter, Tumblr and Vine, is a classic example of “believe it and it will happen.”

“People are making connections between the pencils moving and anything they see or hear while that’s happening. There’s no connection there, but because they’ve seen this Charlie game and want to believe it, they’ll relate the two,” he told the Manchester Evening News.

“People will start to see things they perceive as significant because they’re so involved in it. When people see this online and do it, they’re expecting something to happen. When you expect something to happen, you’ll start to establish patterns and relate arbitrary things.”

He added, “Anything that happens, people are associating it with Charlie. The whole thing has been amplified because of social media.”

When teens were saying “Bloody Mary” into their mirrors, the Internet wasn’t there to make the spookiness go viral.

The Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey wrote that “Charlie makes a killer case study in virality and how things move in and out of languages and cultures online. You’ll notice, for instance, a lot of players and reporters talking about the game as if it were new, when it’s actually — and more interestingly, I think — an old game that has just recently crossed the language divide.”

Some critics quickly credited gravity for the pencil movement, and our brains for the creepiness.

“It’s possible that strange things are happening. But it’s equally likely that after playing the game the brain gets itself into a state that makes it extra suggestible and fearful,” wrote the Independent’s Andrew Griffith.

“That’s the same thing that makes people more likely to hear strange noises when they’re on their own or in the dark. In both of those situations, people are genuinely more in danger — so the brain think itself into a special fight or flight state that makes it extra-vigilant to noises, so that those dangers can be avoided.”

Stephen Schlozman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, told Fusion that the teenage brain is wired to embrace “spooky stuff.”

“You hit this adolescent stage, and it’s exciting because suddenly the world is full of conflicting ideas, whereas before it was pretty straightforward,” Schlozman said.

Essentially, Charlie Charlie is no different from the Ouija board and other teen-embraced creepy games that came before it.

“Indeed, ‘Charlie Charlie’ reminds teens that their limbic systems are limber,” wrote Fusion’s Isha Aran. “It’s a way for them to feel like they’re breaking some kind of rule, toying around with expectations and some pretty spooky s***. And it’s perfectly low stakes—the only thing that’s risked when getting in touch with little Charlie is a sheet of paper. AND YOUR SOUL.”

Of course, some teens missed the eerie “summon a demon” memo and simply wanted to know if good ol’ Charlie could tell them which One Direction member was available for marriage or when Justin Bieber’s next album will drop.