I’m writing a contemporary vampire novel. In this novel I have an Irish vampire, who immigrated to the United states in the middle of the civil war, was drafted by the union army and fought in the eastern theater. He was shot in the stomach at Antietam and lay dying when he was turned into a vampire by accident. The vampire who made him, an ex-slave called Bathsheba was walking through the battlefield at night feeding on the dying men. She got badly scratched on the face by one of these men and was bleeding when she fed on him. The blood trickled into his open mouth, he swallowed it and was turned into a vampire.
Now here are my questions:
1). How soon after immigrating to America would a male Irish immigrant be drafted? I've seen it dramatized in Gangs of New York, where they were drafting them right off the boat. But I doubt that is the case.
2). Michael O'Riordan the character in question was from a rural part of Ireland uneducated and quite superstitious. He sees Bathsheba above him before she feeds on him. However this is the 1860s would he think that she is a Banshee
Now I’ve looked up Banshees and Irish in the Civil War on wikipedia but I didn’t find much, that would be useful.
