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The 6-year-old chain letter about a dying boy in England had already become a postal nightmare, routinely resurrected by well-meaning softies who somehow never heard that Craig is healthy and has all the get-well cards a warehouse can hold.

But this summer, in yet another twist on the complicated byways of cyberspace, the chain letter about Craig Shergold, who was once gravely ill from a brain tumor, was entered into the corporate e-mail system and onto the Internet.

Now a Chicago-area group that had absolutely nothing to do with the boy's original wish to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for most get-well cards, has found its operations disrupted by hundreds of phone calls about the letter, which seems to have acquired an annoying immortality and has escalated to the realm of urban legend.

If nothing else, the whole saga makes for a heartening commentary on the charity of the world's citizenry, if a chilling reminder of the computer's potential to invigorate the plague of the chain letter.

Ironically, the Chicago office of the Phoenix-based Make-A-Wish Foundation, which tries to help brighten the lives of dying children, has been forced this summer to divert staff time to the Craig letter, which includes this poignant plea: "Speed is very important!"

"Craig told us he wishes he could have another wish so he could wish for all this to stop," said Christy Chappelear, spokeswoman for Children's Wish Foundation International, the Atlanta-based group that organized Craig's 1989 campaign.

In Chicago, Make-A-Wish employees sigh with resignation whenever a caller starts the conversation: "I have this letter here. . . ." The foundation even published a pamphlet, "Chapter Guide to Craig Shergold Inquiries," to deal with this time-consuming nuisance.

"We've been taking calls like this for five years, so it's nothing new to us," said Mary Anne Pecora, communications manager for Make-A-Wish Foundation of Northern Illinois. "But this time, we've just been inundated. It's amazing the letter's still circulating."

The letter apparently returned with a vengeance after hitting the e-mail systems of a few major employers, including at least two Chicago hospitals.

Pecora said she also talked to a Motorola Inc. employee who saw the message flash across her computer screen and thought it sounded familiar. The woman told Pecora she'd send out a correction.

Margot Brown, spokeswoman for the Schaumburg-based electronics company, said she didn't read any e-mail about the Craig plea. Motorola strictly forbids employees from sending chain letters over e-mail.

"We've got over 20,000 employees in the state of Illinois, so there's always the chance one of them is sympathetic to this type of thing," Brown said.

Sympathy is why busy people who would never consider responding to a chain letter somehow find the time to gather business cards and forward the letter to a dozen friends. And it's why people forget repeated reminders-from news reports, Craig's parents and even Ann Landers-to stop sending cards.

Craig realized his wish in 1990. He was 10 when he made the Guinness Book of World Records for receiving 16 million cards from well-wishers from dozens of countries.

The campaign arose when a London doctor teased Craig that he was getting so many cards he should go for the record. Craig's mother thought the goal would be a great way to cheer up her son, who was upset because he missed a planned meeting with Princess Diana. The British press, which took note of Di's interest in Craig's case, announced the boy's dying goal. In turn, the London office of Children's Wish Foundation spread the word to its U.S. offices.

The story eventually captured the attention of Virginia billionaire John Kluge, chairman of Metromedia Co., who paid to bring Craig to the U.S. for an operation.

By separating the two hemispheres of the brain, doctors at the University of Virginia Medical Center removed 95 percent of the malignant tumor in March 1991. In four years, the cancer has not returned. Craig's parents, Ernie and Marion Shergold, call it a miracle for a boy once told by his doctors to "go home and die in peace."

Craig is now a thriving 16-year-old in Surrey, England, with a world-famous name scribbled on enough envelopes to fill the Children's Wish Foundation warehouse in Atlanta, said foundation spokeswoman Chappelear.

In chain-letter hell, however, Craig is getting younger and sicker every day.

"Please remember speed is very important!" the newest on-line and electronic mail messages declare. "Craig is very ill."

The pleas say he's 7 and has terminal cancer. His last name is spelled wrong, and somehow the get-well cards he first wanted became business cards. The coordinating agency is listed as Children's Make-A-Wish Foundation-a cross between the two foundations that only adds to the confusion. Even the address is outdated, but that hasn't stopped the flow of mail arriving at Children's Wish Foundation's new headquarters.

"The letters are still coming in in bags every day, but all of a sudden it started going bananas," said Chappelear, who attributed the surge to a new version that listed Aug. 15 as Craig's deadline to capture the world record. "Somebody did a doozy of a job on that one."

The Craig chain letter made it to Matshidiso Masire in Botswana, Africa, who was moved by the sad tale of a dying boy collecting business cards. So she gathered a dozen cards from her colleagues at Barclay's Bank, bought a 55-cent air-mail stamp, and sent the cards 9,400 miles to an address in Atlanta.

A year and a half later, she is an intern at Make-A-Wish in Chicago, where she's doing work on a graduate degree at DePaul University. And now Masire must discourage others from being sucked in by the bogus plea.

Incidentally, it wasn't Craig's story that prompted the Botswana native to volunteer at Make-A-Wish: She had heard of the organization while she was an undergraduate in Los Angeles. But she didn't learn until she started working for the Chicago office that her heartfelt effort from afar ended up as pulp at an Atlanta recycling center.

"I think like everybody else, I saw it as a social responsibility . . . to collect these business cards," she said. "I wish I had known."

Make-A-Wish has established an 800 number to handle Craig inquiries, which during slack times gets about 500 calls per month, said Virginia Garrison, spokeswoman at the national headquarters in Phoenix. In July, the volume jumped to 2,000 and is just now starting to dip back to normal levels.

Just this week, Craig's tale of woe went out on America Online, and Garrison rushed to correct it.

"All these new methods of communication . . . have redefined the chain letter," Garrison said.

Does this mean Craig's letter will survive into the next millennium?

"Oh, God, I hope not," Garrison said. "Enough is enough."

(cite provided by snopes)