Like I said above a few months ago, I've never had any kind of a ghost encounter at Shiloh (or anywhere else), but I did have kind of an eery experience there one time. If you've ever been to Shiloh, you've probably seen the small campground on the south side of the park, just across Highway 22. Literally, you walk across the road, you're in the park, that's how close it is. I was tent-camping there several years ago, in late-April. Stayed for several days, and I was the only person in the campground the entire time.
One night, I'm lying there half-awake, I think around 2 or so in the morning, when I suddenly heard footsteps swishing through the leaves outside, toward my tent. They came right up to my tent, and
stopped. If you've ever had the experience of going from half-awake to way beyond fully awake with lightning speed, that was me.
I laid there for several minutes, listening with what you might call extreme interest, but didn't hear anything else. No more steps, no voice suddenly asking if I could give them directions to Corinth at 2 in the morning, nothing. Not a sound.
I thought about asking who was there and what do you want, but you have to be able to speak to do something like that. I've found that speaking with your heart in your throat is kind of hard to do. So I kept quiet.
I finally summoned the courage to step outside and find out what was going on. So I opened the tent-fly and jumped out, using my flashlight like it was some kind of light-saber, flashing it all over the place. Nothing. No person, no animal, no ghost, no nothing. I checked the ground around my tent, and found no footprints.
What's more, I also realized that there were no leaves on the ground near my tent, despite the fact that I very clearly heard footsteps coming through the leaves. So I went back inside, and pretended to sleep for a few hours till the sun came up.
I'm 99.99% convinced that it was just a dream. The campground is located on ground where part of the Confederate army lined up for battle on the night of April 5th, and I knew that. So I'm sure that my mind was just having a little fun by scaring the absolute hell out of me. And yeah, it worked.
In fact, it worked so well that I can still hear those footsteps in my mind, swishing toward me through the leaves, as if it happened last night. It's one of the more realistic sound-effect dreams I think I've ever had.
Perry