About

The Charlie Charlie Challenge is a game in which participants place two pencils on top of a piece of paper with the alternating words "yes" and "no" written in a 2×2 grid. If the top pencil moves to the word "yes" after chanting the phrase "Charlie Charlie, can we play?" or "Charlie, Charlie, are you here?", it is assumed that a Mexican demon named Charlie has been summoned to answer other questions. To end the game, players chant the phrase "Charlie, Charlie, can we stop?"

Origin

On June 6th, 2014, the challenge may have originated with a video titled "Jugando Charly Charlie" (playing Charly Charlie) uploaded by YouTuber Le Videoblog, in which two men form a rectangle out of six pencils before calling upon a spirit to move the pencils into a hexagon shape (shown below). On January 6th, 2015, the pencil blog Pencils.com^[9] published an article explaining the rules of the game, which included the "Charlie Charlie" chant.

Spread

In May 2015, videos featuring a variant of the game featuring a ouija-style board began circulating on Vine. On May 24th, YouTuber Vine Best uploaded a compilation of Charlie Challenge Vine videos (shown below, left). On May 25th, The Vigilant Christian YouTube channel posted a video about the challenge, which criticized the practice as dangerous for "calling upon demons" (shown below, right).

That day, Twitter user @RicexGum^[1] posted a photograph of a piece of paper with the words "Download my mixtape fam" with the hashtag "#charliecharliechallenge" (shown below). In the first 24 hours, the tweet gained over 2,600 favorites and 2,000 retweets.

Meanwhile, Twitter user @Lisaaaa_sanchez tweeted a parody video in which two Corona bottles are substituted for pencils, which garnered upwards of 20,200 retweets and 16,500 favorites in the first day.

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the challenge, including The Daily What,^[2] BBC,^[3] Telegraph,^[4] The Huffington Post,^[5] The Independent^[6] and CNN.^[7]

Hoax Debate

On May 30th, 2015, the Livejournal^[10] pop culture community ONTD highlighted a post claiming that the challenge is a viral marketing stunt for the upcoming found footage-style horror film The Gallows, which cited a teaser trailer for the film wherein a group of teens can be heard playing the game. The promotional video was uploaded to Warner Bros Pictures' Latinoamerica YouTube channel on May 27th (shown below).

On June 1st, the news sites UpRoxx,^[11] Jezebel^[12] and The Daily Dot^[13] all published articles speculating that the challenge was a viral marketing campaign. That same day, The Independent^[14] published an article arguing that the viral marketing claims were based on flimsy evidence and poor reporting. On June 2nd, Snopes^[15] published a blog post addressing the viral marketing rumors, noting that it was currently unclear.

Search Interest

External References