Jedidiah Mortonson is a character created by author C. J. Henderson as an antagonist in his Frank Nardi series of short stories.
History[]
Born over three hundred years ago, Jedidiah Mortonson was hung by the citizens of Arkham for child sacrifice and the practice of black magic, before they appropriated his house to, ironically, convert it into an orphanage. What the locals had failed to realise was that Mortonson had already lived far beyond his natural span through the use of his blood magic, and an extension of the spell allowed him to transfer his consciousness into the walls of his former home upon death.
Mortonson spent the next one hundred and fifty years inhabiting the bodies of those who dwelt within the house, draining their life's essence to fuel his own, until the closure of the orphanage. The departure of the inhabitants caused him to wither, and with no life force to drain, he began to die.
This state of existence continued until the property was purchased by Edward and Julie Douglas in the present day. Mortonson promptly began his psychic draining of the couple, but was eventually thwarted and killed by the intervention of Frank Nardi and the Arkham Detective Agency. Upon his death, the old house imploded, leaving nothing but a great hole in its place.
Behind the Mythos[]
The character of Jedidiah Mortonson was created by C. J. Henderson shortly before his death in 2014. He was intended as the first antagonist for his hard-boiled private detective Frank Nardi, and featured in two of the Nardi stories, although his involvement in the first was limited to a short point-of-view section at the end.