My OCs

Evelyn Violetta Blackwood (Multi-fandom)

A/N: Finally, without further ado, she is here! Batgirl has finally been made! Although some of my original ideas for her were changed up a bit, she remarkable turned out somewhat how I imagined her to be. She took a lot of work though, originally I was just having to research how a person could be considered a vampire without actually being one and a time period. However, that turned into researching a whole span of different things such as Puritans, Tuberculosis, Porphyria and the climate of two American colonies and their history. All the while Batgirl's concept was constantly changing as I kept running into the problem of there not being a lot of material on what I was researching (Darn you Serbia!).

Anyways, as always I will tell you some highlights from my research. In the 18th century there was such thing as swaddling clothes that literally kept a baby from moving their arms. Boys in the 18th century wore dress-like garments until they were 4-7 years old where they were given their first pair of breeches (pants). For women there was two types of clothing: dress and undress. Dress was a lady's most formal fashionable clothes while undress was less formal clothing that was still in the best of fashion. You did not want to be a Puritan in the 18th century, children were taught to not show extreme emotion, could not exert their will and could only play with their parents' permission. Puritans believed that children were born sinful and therefore they had to break the will of the child to set them on the path to salvation. There are two types of Tuberculosis: Latent Tuberculosis which is when you have an infection but the bacteria is inactive in your body and does not cause symptoms and Active Tuberculosis which is where you are showing symptoms and can spread the disease to others. Tuberculosis in some cases can move from your lungs to your kidneys, spine or brain. There are four stages of Tuberculosis, most people do not go past stage three, but 5-10% of cases do. The first three stages most of the time do not cause symptoms because during the third stage the bacteria becomes inactive due to the body  bringing in immune support to control the infection. Once the bacteria is inactive any of the lung tissue that was damaged heals and leaves behind nothing but a scar. However, in some cases it does not heal and the bacteria can become reactivated 1 to 2 years after the initial infection and replicate quickly causing a cavity in the lung. From this cavity the bacteria quickly spreads through the tissue and the person develops the signs and symptoms of Tuberculosis. Now, the reason that I looked up Tuberculosis, in the American colonies there was a Tuberculosis outbreak in the 1730's that eventually escalated into the New England Vampire Panic. The first documented "vampire" case was in 1790 and the last reported case was in 1892. You see, the people at the time did not really understand how the body decomposes and how disease worked. So, the people in panic began to believe that the dead were coming back to life to suck the remaining life force out of their family members. Although the word vampire was never used. Here's how it worked, a suspected vampire was dug up and examined. If the body was less decomposed than expected they would slice the body open and examine the internal organs. If an organ contained liquid blood, the person was deemed possessed. Also, if they happened to have blood in their mouth or if their hair and nails appeared to have grown longer. Oftentimes to keep the vampire attacks from continuing people did things such as: flipping a corpse over so that it was facing down in its grave, burning the blood filled organ and feeding the ashes to the sick, inhaling smoke, beheading corpses or shattering the bones of corpses and rearranging them in a skull and crossbones symbol. In other places some people even put bricks in corpses mouths or put a steak through their heart. This has to do with tuberculosis because the bacteria essentially eats the tissue, so no wonder there would be be blood in the organs. Coughing up blood because it is attacking your lungs also explains the blood found in some corpses' mouths. Also, the decomposition thing. They did not understand decomposition of a body, or at the very least what factors can cause a body to decompose faster of slower. For example, a body will decompose a lot faster in the heat than it does in the cold. In one of the most famous cases, the Mercy Brown case, her body was in a above-ground vault during winter and therefore did not decompose as quickly. That made her a vampire in the eyes of the people, her heart was promptly burned and fed to her sick brother who died soon afterwards. That is enough for now, I am so sorry y'all! I have spent half this thing just going over my research. I will now get to the profile that you guys all probably came for.