Charlie Charlie Challenge

The Charlie Charlie challenge is a divination game in which people try to summon a spirit named Charlie to answer yes or no questions, with the answer found by waiting for a balanced pencil to point toward the word Yes or No written on a sheet of paper. As with a Magic 8 Ball, most players, typically teenagers, do not sincerely believe in the power of the mechanism; the game is a modern incarnation of an older Spanish game called Juego de la Lapicera, the Pencil Game, and was popularized in the English-speaking world in 2015, partly through the hashtag CharlieCharlieChallenge, after an alarmist tabloid television newscast about the game being played in Hato Mayor Province of the Dominican Republic was uploaded to YouTube on 29 April 2015, whose unintentional humor led the game to trend on Twitter and cross the language barrier to be played around the world.