The Curia has advised parents to discuss the Charlie Charlie Challenge with their children in a “calm and mature” way but at the same time it did not rule out a supernatural explanation for the game.

The ‘challenge’ is a Twitter phenomenon that has spread through Maltese schools and caused concern as children were reported getting scared playing the game.

It involves participants asking ‘Charlie’, described as a Mexican demon, a series of yes-or-no questions. The movement of two pencils placed on top of another supposedly indicates the demon’s response.

“The fact is the pencils do move. What makes them move? We simply do not know for sure,” say Church guidelines to parents distributed in Church schools last week.

“The explanation could range from physics, collective psychology, psychic forces, brainpower, imagination, fantasy, sheer peer pressure to spiritual, occult forces or a combination of them all.”

The guidelines encourage parents to avoid panic and to discuss the game in an “unprejudiced, calm and mature way”, while trusting in children’s “innate ability to distinguish between what is harmful and what is positively beneficial.” 

However, it also states that a supernatural explanation for the game cannot be ruled out, and warns parents about the “effects of this occult-magical phenomenon”.

Scientists have attributed the game, which some believe originated as part of a viral marketing campaign for a horror film called The Gallows, to nothing more spooky than gravity and the unstable arrangement of the pencils. 

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