Imagine that your friend comes over one day and brings a Ouija board with him.
You both sit and start to try to contact evil spirits, your skeptical eye watching every
move the planchette makes and trying to figure out if your friend's pulling your leg.
Suddenly the planchette starts moving from the letter Z to the letter O, over and over
again rapidly, and after making its presence known, this 'spirit' starts answering questions
about relatives of yours with incredible accuracy.
Creeped out, the next day you get curious and google the name Zozo, only to discover
thousands of similar accounts written across various message boards online.
Hello and welcome to another special episode of The Infographics Show's Greatest Mysteries:
The Zozo Demon.
You don't have to imagine the preceding scenario, because it has in fact happened to thousands
of people around the world.
Whether using ouija boards, automatic writing, or various other spiritual contact techniques,
people all around the world have reported contacting an entity calling itself “Zozo”.
With the advent of the internet, people began to share their stories online, each person
shocked to discover that hundreds, if not thousands of others had had the same experiences
as they did.
Possibly more terrifying though is the fact that stories about Zozo have been around for
hundreds of years, with one of the oldest accounts coming from Collin de Plancy's demonic
encyclopedia, the Dictionnaire Infernal.
According to de Plancy, a young girl claimed to be constantly harassed by three evil spirits:
Mimi, Crapoulet, and Zozo.
The demons would torment the girl and force her to walk on her hands, or act indecent
in the company of others.
Eventually she was exorcised successfully, although the priest performing the rite was
warned not to attempt another exorcism by the police.
It's easy to discount old tales as mere superstition, or even to discount modern testimony as simply
flights of fancy that appropriate old legends or scary stories.
It's not so easy however to explain the massive amount of collaborative testimony available
online, specially from people surprised to discover so many others allegedly having contact
with the same entity.
Encounters with Zozo tend to go the same way- contactees will be using a Ouija board or
other spirit contact technique, and Zozo will make its presence known by spelling out its
name.
Typically it will then answer questions that would be difficult for other people around
you to know the answers to in an effort to gain your trust.
Other times it will simply start to spell out expletives.
Contact with Zozo typically results in something tragic happening shortly after- one man claims
that his wife left his daughter in the bath tub and stepped out for a moment, which was
long enough for his daughter to begin drowning.
After rescuing her she was struck ill by a mysterious infection days later.
Another woman claims that on the same day as her contact with Zozo she was hit by a
drunk driver.
People differ on what exactly Zozo is, but whatever it is it's clearly got a bad temper.
Some say that Zozo is a demon, possibly even the ancient Mesopotamian king of wind demons,
Pazuzu.
Others believe Zozo is simply a malevolent entity that appropriated the name because
of growing fear around it.
Yet others believe that Zozo is not a single entity, but rather a name that various evil
or mischievous spirits use to scare us, knowing how scared we have become of contacting the
ill-tempered Zozo.
These people think that spirits may simply be having a bit of fun with us by using the
name, while more evil spirits appropriate it in order to scare us- and fear, they believe,
gives the spirits power.
Whatever its origin, some of Zozo's characteristics involve an attraction to the female sex, preferring
contact with women over men.
Zozo also seems to be attracted to people with suicidal tendencies, depression, or other
psychological disorders.
Researchers claim that these people are more vulnerable to demonic influence, giving a
demon more power over them and making it easier to push them to do extreme things such as
suicide or hurting or scaring others.
Those who claim to have come in contact with Zozo describe sudden and intense feelings
of anger, fear, depression, or generally black thoughts as they talk with Zozo.
Their encounters are typically followed by seemingly bad luck.
Others though are more severely affected, with some claiming to have suffered physical
symptoms such as headaches, sleepwalking, and the appearance of marks and bruises on
their bodies.
This is all quite terrifying- if true.
Along with the host of believers, there are just as many skeptics however, and the preferred
tool of contact with Zozo, the Ouija board, is itself fraught with doubts.
For starters, it's a game manufactured by a major toy company, and many skeptics have
a hard time swallowing the fact that spirits and demons are immediately accessible with
a simple board game.
There may be some merit to that point, but then again, if the world of spirits and demons
is real then who says they need some special, archaic and mysterious method to contact us?
But that's hardly the only criticism leveled at the Ouija board.
In 1972 psychologists ran an experiment to see if people could have paranormal spirit
contact experiences through nothing more than human will- basically they wanted to see if
it was all just in our heads.
For the study, they made up a fictional person named Philip Aylesford and then invited a
group of people to run a séance in order to summon his ghost.
The group eventually made contact with the entity, becoming convinced that they could
feel Philip's presence, hearing knocking sounds coming from the table, felt the table physically
vibrate, and at one point saw the table tilt up onto two legs.
All the while, they had no idea that Philip had been completely made up.
The study proved just how susceptible we can be to believing in the paranormal with just
the smallest amount of prodding.
Yet, if the world of spirits and demons is real, what's to say that a mischievous spirit
or evil demon didn't simply respond to the séance, knowing full well what was taking
place, and reveling in the frustration the entire affair would cause when the participants
were told there was no such person as the one they claimed to be speaking to?
Why would spirits and demons be any different than we are- basically, why wouldn't a spirit
troll a scientific study way back in 1972?
Other skeptics point at the ideomotor effect as an explanation for 'contact' with Zozo
and other paranormal entities.
The ideomotor effect is the subconscious and involuntary movement of muscles, typically
to a very small and likely imperceptible degree.
This effect has been well documented, most famously by the famed Michael Faraday who
built a device to show how the ideomotor effect was responsible for the 'table-turning' fad
that swept supernatural-believing London.
Today, skeptics claim that ouija board communications are nothing more than the subconscious mind
using the ideomotor effect to push the planchette around and give us the answers we are seeking.
Zozo may well be simply a product of our own subconscious pushing a planchette on a ouija
board with movements so imperceptible that even we ourselves are fooled into believing
a supernatural explanation.
Yet that doesn't explain the global internet phenomenon which has seen thousands of people
all claiming contact with the exact same entity.
Skeptics point out the possibility of a mass psychological trend amongst all these believers,
or that potentially every single one of them is simply making up a tall tale.
Both answers could be true, but with just as much hard evidence for either those two
answers as there is for Zozo- that being zero- it's a special kind of irony that the belief
Zozo is not real requires just as much fact-less faith as the belief that it is.
Do you think Zozo is real?
Have you ever encountered this entity?
Tell us your story in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video Scariest Ghost Stories.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.