If you are one of those cantankerous folks who believe the kids these days are somehow less motivated than generations before, then I come bearing new proof: Even their superstitions are more feeble than ours!

“Charlie Charlie,” a game/Internet urban legend of abrupt and incomprensible popularity, steamed to the top of the global social media charts this weekend after flinging all around on the Spanish-language Internet for much of eternity. As of this publishing, #CharlieCharlieChallenge has been tweeted more than 1.6 million times. More people are Googling “Charlie Charlie” than practically any other news occurrence.

What is all this about?! Below, a no-nonsense interpreter for the old/unimpressed.

How do you play Charlie Charlie?

Simple! You could, if you wished, even do it at your table.

Step 1: Open your Vine and get the camera rolling. (If you don’t have Vine, you ARE too old for this.)
Step 2: Draw an X on a piece of paper.
Step 3: Label two of the resulting quadrants “no,” and the other two “yes.”
Step 4: Place two overlapping pencils on each axis of your grid, crossing them in the middle.
Step 5: Say “Charlie, Charlie, are you there?” and ask a question. (i.e., “is one of my friends going to die soon,” “will I go to prom next May.” )
Step 6: Scream, probably.

Where did this come from?

Even while it’s hard to resolve an exact country of origin, Charlie Charlie (also spelled Charly Charly) has a long background as a schoolyard game in the Spanish-speaking world. Based on one seven-year-old Yahoo! Respuestas thread – that’s Yahoo Answers to you – children have played a version of the “classic game” in Spain for generations.

Traditionally, this variation with the crossed pencils was called the “Juego de la Lapicera” – a phrase that still turns up lots of weird stuff on Google – and “Charlie Charlie” was a specific game, played with colored pencils. At some point in their Internet and playground journeys, the 2 games seem to have combined. In either case, both have always had demonic or supernatural associations; one site calls Lapicera “the poor man’s Ouija board.”

Why is it popular again right now?

It’s often hard to point out exactly why these things trend, but the current bubble appears to have begun in late April in the Dominican province of Hato Mayor, when a local TV news station broadcast a extremely alarmist (and unintentionally funny) report about the “Satanic” game overtaking local schools. From there, social media users in the Dominican Republic began tweeting, Instagramming and Vining about the game; by mid-May, the phrase “Charlie Charlie” was trending on Dominican Twitter, an easy jump away from the rest of Spanish-language Internet.

Subsequently, over the weekend, a 17-year-old girl in central Georgia Instagrammed her game and labeled it with the hashtag #CharlieCharlieChallenge. That hashtag was, seemingly, all the kids needed: It’s been tweeted 1.6 million times since then.

Who is Charlie, anyways?

Via numerous corners of the Spanish-speaking Internet: a child who committed suicide, the victim of a fatal car accident, or a pagan Mexican deity who now convenes with the Christian devil. The Mexican deity bit, at the least, is demonstrably untrue.

“There’s no demon called ‘Charlie’ in Mexico,” stated Maria Elena Navez of BBC Mundo.

Is this as hazardous as some of the other viral teen challenges going around?

Granted that no one’s setting themselves on fire, inhaling a caustic substance or deforming their lips, Charlie Charlie looks … pretty benign.

Nevertheless, based on popular legend, Charlie haunts players who neglect to say goodbye before they close out of the game. And there are, naturally, a whole lot of people who don’t love the kids-summoning-demons thing.

Why should I care? (Should I even care?!)

Get real, you should absolutely care if you’re seeking supernatural answers to your life questions. (Excepting questions about love, death and money, which – per certain variations of the legend – Charlie will not respond to.)

Even if that doesn’t specifically describe you, though, Charlie makes a killer case study in virality and how things move in and out of languages and cultures on the internet. You’ll realize, for instance, a lot of players and reporters talking about the game as if it were completely new, when it’s really – and more perhaps surprisingly, I think – an old game that has just lately crossed the language partition.

This is also, pretty notably, yet another illustration of the power of the teenage Internet. Write off their little games as ridiculous, sure – but we never trended “Bloody Mary” or “Ouija board.”

The Rabbit Hole Goes Real Deep, Find Out How Deep… HERE