Is the Charlie Charlie challenge real? Where the 2015 game came from

What the Charlie Charlie legend says

The Charlie Charlie game needs a sheet of paper, two pencils and a nervous group of players. Someone draws a cross on the paper and writes yes in two opposite squares and no in the other two. One pencil is laid along one line, and a second pencil is balanced across it along the other. Then the players call on a spirit named Charlie, asking "Charlie, Charlie, can we play?" If the top pencil swings towards yes, Charlie is said to be present, and the players go on to ask him yes-or-no questions.

Accounts of who Charlie is vary. Spanish-language corners of the internet, The Washington Post found, cast him as a child who died young, someone killed on the road, or an old pagan god from Mexico said to be in league with the Christian devil. Some versions add rules: Charlie will not answer questions about love, death or money, and he troubles players who stop without saying goodbye. That is the whole Charlie Charlie challenge legend: a summoning, a yes-or-no oracle and a warning.

Where the game started

It did not start in 2015, and it did not start with a demon. Caitlin Dewey, who then ran the Post's Intersect blog on internet culture, traced it to schoolyards in the Spanish-speaking world. A crossed-pencil game called the Juego de la Lapicera had circulated there for a long time, while Charlie Charlie was originally a separate game played with coloured pencils; somewhere between playgrounds and the internet the two merged. BBC Trending also noted a Spanish-language YouTube clip uploaded about a year before the craze, titled in translation Playing Charlie Charlie, which shows a somewhat different pencil trick and may help explain why the game picked up a Mexican label.

The 2015 surge has a clearer starting point. According to the Post, a local television station in Hato Mayor province in the Dominican Republic broadcast an alarmed report in late April about a supposedly satanic game spreading through schools. Dominican users began posting about it, and by mid-May the phrase was trending on Dominican Twitter. In the days before the Post's article of 26 May, an American teenager posted her game on Instagram under the hashtag #CharlieCharlieChallenge, and English-speaking social media took it from there.

How the challenge spread in 2015

It spread very fast. BBC Trending reported on 26 May 2015 that more than 2 million people had used the hashtag in the previous 48 hours, and the Post counted more than 1.6 million tweets. Much of the coverage treated the game as new, which the Post argued missed the more interesting point: an old game had just crossed from Spanish into English.

Religious leaders responded quickly. Christianity Today reported on 4 June 2015 that the televangelist Pat Robertson warned viewers that demons are "not playthings and they are certainly not parlor games", and that José Antonio Fortea, a Madrid-based Catholic exorcist, warned that spirits behind the game would trouble some of the people who played it. In the Bahamas a school guidance counsellor wrote to local pastors asking them to pray for students, and in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, teachers told some young pupils not to play the game or even discuss it.

A second rumour followed: that the whole thing was a marketing campaign for The Gallows, a horror film due out in July 2015 about the death of a boy named Charlie. The same Christianity Today report quoted Snopes, which concluded that the link to the film appeared only after the challenge had already dropped off the trending lists.

Which details hold up

The Mexican demon does not. The most widely cited rebuttal came from Maria Elena Navez of BBC Mundo, the BBC's Spanish-language service, who told BBC Trending: "There's no demon called 'Charlie' in Mexico." In her account, Mexican legends tend to grow out of Aztec and Maya history or out of beliefs that took hold during the Spanish conquest; the gods of that older world have Nahuatl names such as Tezcatlipoca; and a figure invented after the conquest would probably be known by the Spanish form, Carlitos. She added that demons billed as Mexican are, as a rule, invented in the United States. The Post called the Mexican-deity version demonstrably untrue. We did not find a named academic folklorist quoted on the question at the time; the rebuttals on record come from these journalists.

The moving pencil holds up, but not as evidence of anything supernatural. With the Charlie Charlie challenge explained in physical terms, the trick is in the setup. Two round pencils laid crosswise barely touch, so the top one rests right at the edge of balance and very little is needed to tip it. Andrew Griffin of The Independent made this case in 2015. In his explanation, crossed pencils are in an arrangement they will not hold for long: the faintest disturbance, such as a player's breath or a table that is not quite level, sets the top one turning, while a pair that grips too firmly simply stays where it is. His suggested test was to set the pencils up without the paper or the words and watch them move anyway. He also suggested that the uneasy feeling some players report afterwards comes from a brain primed to be fearful, the same state that makes people hear noises in the dark.

Verdict

Is the Charlie Charlie challenge real? The game is: schoolchildren in the Spanish-speaking world were playing versions of it long before 2015. The supernatural part is not. No demon called Charlie exists in Mexican folklore, and the pencils move for ordinary physical reasons that anyone can reproduce in silence. The Charlie Charlie challenge true story is a playground game that crossed into English in a few days in May 2015, carried by a Dominican news report, a hashtag and a misleading label. Real or Legend files the demon as debunked.