Chain Letters Home Page

Copyright: Charles Bennett, Ming Li, Bin Ma, Nov. 1999

Letters

These chain letters were collected by Charles Bennett during the period of 1980--1995. We have used these letters in our study "Linking chain letters" by Charles Bennett, Ming Li and Bin Ma. A popularized version of this paper has appeared in the June 2003 issue of Scientific American. For more serious readers, here is a more mathematical version. The following are the very texts of the letters that were used as inputs to our programs and in our study. Following each text file, we have also included the original version of the letter for comparison and verification purposes.

Some Other Letters (Not used in our study)

The following letters were also collected by Charles Bennett during the period of 1980--1995. We have not used these letters in our study "Linking chain letters" due to obvious reasons. Some are non-English letters, although apparently originated from the same roots.

Distance Matrix

Distance Matrix d(x,y) for the above 33 letters

New Letters and Messages From the Readers

A St. Jude letter, with Yenezuela typo. This chain letter has been taped to Sonia John's wall for ten years or more. Sonia wrote: "I've received variations of this chain letter perhaps three times in my life--first in the mid 60's, I believe, once in the 70's, and then the most recent one. After I received it, I showed it to a friend. He read part way through it and exclaimed, "this says 'Gene Wall in the Phillipines'--it is supposed to be 'General Walsh!' This letter is a fake!" At that point we both got a laugh out of the idea that such a letter could be a "fake!" "Like most people, I suppose, my first reaction to receiving a letter like that would be, "just wait until I get my hands on the person who sent this." Then, I would start thinking about it as if I had received an overdue bill from an unexpected source: "all right, all right, how much do I owe?" In this case, around $20, counting the stamps, envelopes, xeroxing, etc. Obviously I have grossly exceeded the allotted 96 hours to fulfill my duties to St. Jude, and I confess that I have experienced some bad luck during the past ten years, ... I think that I kept it taped to my wall all of these years because it was a reminder that there was still some (hopefully small) part of my brain that was responsive to and fascinated by notions of divine bounty and punishment."
Readers with new chain letters are encouraged to submit them to Van Arsdale's Daniel VanArsdale's chain letter archive, according to his established procedures, so that the new letters can be collected in a standard manner that is both rigorous from a folkloric point of view (date, place, and the other types of documentation VanArsdale asks for) while being suitable for automatic phylogentic analysis. New submitters are urged to send the original or at least a scan or a good photocopy of the letter, preferably with the envelope and postmark, in order to avoid email junk that mutates too easily and has never been in an envelope.