Weird Guys: Stalked by an Anonymous Chain Letter

 After I posted my unpublished essay about not bailing a guy out, I started thinking about other strange happenings in my life that had to do with one or more weird guys. One of the weirdest may be the anonymous chain letter that dogged me for years and I never fully understood why. I never obtained any "smoking gun" evidence tying it to a particular person, but circumstantial evidence makes me 99.99% certain it was a particular guy.

I wasn't a person who regularly got cards or letters from friends in high school. I didn't give my address out to anybody. I didn't have much contact even with those of my classmates that lived in the same neighborhood as me, the ones who would obviously know where I lived.

One day I got a letter, stuffed into a small envelope of the size that's roughly six-and-one-half inches by three-and-three-quarter inches, the size that's often used for mailing checks. No return address, and a Santa Ana postmark that didn't mean much, just that it was postmarked in Santa Ana, not necessarily that the sender lived in Santa Ana.

Inside was a poor-quality photocopied chain letter, poorly composed, poorly typed, incorrectly laid out, no signature block, unsigned. It's not like I memorized the thing, but the gist of it was: this chain letter was blessed by the holy somebody-or-other, in the Phillipines, I think it was, and it had been around the world some number of times, and a person who didn't break the chain won a million-dollar lottery and a person who broke the chain got stung by a scorpion and died.

So I guess it was telling me to do what the holy whatever blessed, or get stung by a scorpion and die. That's nice. Looking back, I think of it the same way I think of that magazine article in the 1980's that warned college-educated unmarried women that they were more likely to be killed by a terrorist. So all you nice intelligent girls better not go to college and you'd better get married, because you don't want to get killed by some terrorist, do you?

I threw the letter and envelope away, but my mother saw and insisted I show it to her. She read it and proclaimed, "That's a joke!" Whatever that meant. Then she mercilessly pestered me, giving me the third degree, about how I must know who sent it and who did I give my address to?

No, really, Mother, I don't know and I didn't give my address to anybody. Maybe somebody got my address from school records or the phone book or something. She finally accepted reality.

I thought that was the end but--anonymous letters exactly like the first one, in envelopes exactly like the first one, kept showing up. Sometimes years would go by and then one would show up again, sometimes two or more arrived fairly close together.

Eleven or twelve years after the first letter showed up, I moved out of the family home. Some time at my new residence had passed, when, to my horror, a letter identical to all the rest showed up at my new address. I could only think of two people who may have known where I lived back in high school and who also had my new address. Both were talented young men from my drama class, who I'd kept up with because I wanted to keep up with what they might be doing in music and theater. I didn't think either one of them was the type to send a letter like that, but the circumstantial evidence made them persons of interest.

I figured there would be no use to ask either guy outright if he sent the letters. Someone who sends letters anonymously for years isn't going to admit it.

So I guessed it was the guy I'd had the most contact with. I decided to play his game. I put the letter in the same size of small envelope, put no return address on it, and mailed it to him. I figured when he received the letter, he'd keep the chain going and send another letter to me. I'd just sit back and wait for the chain to come my way again.

After two or three weeks, no letter had shown up. So I called him. Without admitting I sent such a letter, I questioned him closely enough that I was satisfied he honestly didn't know anything about it.

That left the other guy. I hadn't actually spoken to him in at least ten years. Very occasionally I would try and phone him, get his mother, she'd take a message, and he'd never return the call. The last time I called, though, I'd told his mother what my new address was. Circumstantial evidence said he couldn't be bothered to return my phone calls, or drop me an actual note, but he could be bothered to mail me bizarre anonymous chain letters, like some creepy stalker, for years upon years. 

I hoped I'd never receive another such letter but I did. Previously I'd always assumed why bother complaining to the post office, it's an anonymous letter, what good is that going to do. This time, I took the letter and its envelope over to my local post office and told the postmaster I wanted to report an anonymous chain letter. Without a word he took the letter and went back into his office.

I don't know if that complaint made the difference, but I never received another such letter. I was free at last.