Jackson Elias

Jackson Elias was a writer, specializing in books about strange and violent cults, published exclusively through Prospero House publishing. He started life as an orphan in Stratford, Connecticut, and learned to make his own way early in life. At the time of his death, he had no living relatives and no permanent address. His best-known book is Sons of Death (1918), exposing modern-day Thuggees in India. He spoke several languages fluently and was almost constantly traveling. He was a friendly social man and enjoyed an occasional drink as well as smoking his pipe. Elias was tough, stable, and punctual, unafraid of brawls or officials. He was mostly self-educated. He met the other Investigators in Lima Peru, where he used the pseudonym Jesse Hughes and pretended to be a folklorist to avoid tipping off Augustus Larkin as to his real identity: that of an author researching the Kharisiri death cult and figuring out the true goals of Larkin and Luis de Mendoza.
Elias was a lifelong skeptic before Peru. While he was fascinated by cults with ghoulish beliefs, he considered their members to be deluded and their evils to be of purely human origin. Faced with incontrovertible proof of the unnatural in Peru, his certainty crumbled. The long-term effect made Elias all the more determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. Learning that the kharisiri were truly monsters only meant that it was more important than ever to stop them.
Alongside the other Investigators, he helped explore and repair the Pyramid Tomb, sealing El Padre de los Gusanos away and beginning the end of the kharisiri. When Larkin and de Mendoza attacked, he fought alongside the others, and he promised to reach out to the others if there ever seemed to be a need for the seven of them to come back together to handle such a threat. A version of the experiences in Peru were recounted in his final book, The Hungry Dead (1923).
The years after Peru found him traveling the world, investigating a group of possibly related cults, including the Cult of the Bloody Tongue and the Cult of the Sand Bat. His investigations began an interest in the Carlyle Expedition, who had been allegedly murdered by the Bloody Tongue cult near Nairobi. His investigations brought him to the belief that some if not all of the Carlyle Expedition were still alive. He called the Investigators to help him, but, before they could meet, he was murdered in his rooms at the Hotel Chelsea by members of the Bloody Tongue. He was disemboweled with Pangas, and the symbol of the cult was cut into his forehead. At the reading of his will, it was revealed that he had left everything he owned to the Investigators. He asked his lawyer, Carlton Ramsey, to liquidate all of his property and establish the Jackson Elias Fund. These moneys, as tracked by Ramsey, would bankroll the Investigators to follow the leads he'd uncovered and find out if what he suspected was true.
Other of his books include:

• Skulls Along the River (1910) - exposes headhunters in the Amazon basin.
• Masters of the Black Arts (1912) - surveys supposed sorcerous cults throughout history.
• The Way of Terror (1913) - analyzes systematization of fear through cult organization.
• The Smoking Heart (1915) - first half discusses historical Mayan death cults, the second half concerns present day Central American death cults.
• Witch Cults of England (1920) - summarizes covens in nine English counties; interviews practicing English witches.
• The Black Power (1921) - expands upon The Way of Terror and includes some material on Asian and African death cults; includes interviews with several anonymous cult leaders.

 
Crime Scene Photo of Jackson with the symbol of the Bloody Tongue carved into his forehead.