One day you finally decide to play Ouija board with your friend and you both sit and start to try to contact evil spirits or the infamous Zozo Demon.
Your skeptical eye watching every move the planchette makes and trying to figure out if it’s real or your friend’s pulling your leg.
Suddenly the planchette starts moving from the letter Z to the letter O, over and over again rapidly. You both look into each other’s eyes nervously.
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.
You don’t have to imagine the preceding scenario, because it has in fact happened to thousands of people around the world.
Who is Zozo?
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, and each person was 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 indecently 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.
Yet, it’s not so easy however to explain the massive amount of collaborative testimony available online. Where people incredibly encountered the same entity.
Zozo Encounters
Encounters with Zozo Demon tend to go the same way, contactees will be using an 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 bathtub 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 power of the spirit.
Characteristics of Zozo
Whatever its origin, some of Zozo’s characteristics involve an attraction to females, 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.
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.
Their encounters are typically followed by seemingly bad luck. This is all quite terrifying – if true.
Skepticism
Along with the host of believers, there are just as many skeptics however, and the preferred tool of contact with Zozo Demon, 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.
The 1972 Experiment
In 1972 psychologists ran an experiment to prove that the experience of a spirit contact is 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.
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?
Ideomotor Effect
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.
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 an 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.
Do you think Ouija Board and the Zozo Demon are real? Have you ever encountered this entity? Tell us your story in the comments!
