Addison Fletcher

The Inventor
Name	Addison Vincent Fletcher
Race
Age	well over 100, although technically dead
Occupation	inventor
Physical appearance
Residence	Blackbury, until 1993
Death
Parents
Relatives
Children
Marital Status
Appearances
Books	Johnny and the Dead
Cameos

Addison Vincent Fletcher was a great inventor, scientist and visionary who, while conventionally vital, was always a little out of his time. He invented an improved telephone in 1922, but of course A.G. Bell had been there first. He envisioned a calculating/"thinking" machine early in the twentieth century, but the necessary semiconductors (or even adequate thermionic valves) weren't available yet.

He is therefore ideally equipped to make use of the technological advances since his death, and with the aid and encouragement of amateur physicist and fellow resident of Blackbury cemetery Solomon Einstein he liberates the Dead from their boring and fettered afterlife. Discorporate spirits, he finds, don't need the physical buttons and levers to operate electrical and mechanical appliances; they can use the underlying principles directly. Having no mass or wind resistance or other drawbacks of "real" bodies, they can ride radio waves, operate computers from the inside and drive off in the idea of a long-dead automobile.

As a result, the Dead no longer need the cemetery which Johnny and Mr. Atterbury have saved, but they're pleased to leave it to the town. "They're places for the living, after all".