Shiloh National Military Park

Shiloh's Bloody Pond turns red every April. Park rangers have been logging phantom drumbeats from the Federal lines for over a century.

The pond at Shiloh National Military Park turns red for a few weeks every spring, and park rangers have been explaining why for over a century. Wounded soldiers from both armies crawled to it on April 6 and 7, 1862, to wash blood from open wounds and to drink. Some died at the waterline. The crimson tint that returns each April is, by the official explanation, peach blossoms reflected on the surface and a seasonal algae bloom. Visitors who have stood there at dusk are not always satisfied with the explanation. The pond is small. The story is bigger than the pond.

Shiloh was a two-day fight that produced 23,746 casualties. Both sides lost more men in those 48 hours than the United States had lost in every previous war combined, which is the statistic that surprised America most when the news came down the wires. Ulysses Grant nearly lost his command over it. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston bled to death in a peach orchard from a leg wound he didn't notice in the heat of battle, ranking him the highest-ranking officer killed in the war. The land along the Tennessee River where this happened became a national military park in 1894, and the haunting reports started almost immediately after.

The phantom drummer is the oldest of them. Park visitors have described hearing a slow, distant drumbeat from the direction of the original Federal lines, with no reenactment scheduled and no other sound around it. Several rangers over the decades have logged the same thing in their patrol notes. The cadence varies, but the pattern is the same. A few minutes of clear, methodical drumming. Then nothing.

The Hornet's Nest, the sunken road position where Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss's division held off Confederate assaults for seven hours on the first day, has produced the heaviest concentration of voice phenomena. Visitors walking the trail have heard moans, single shouts, and what one report called a long, stretched cry for help that came from the woods on either side. By the time the position fell, the area was a slaughter pen. Most accounts of the haunting cluster within a hundred yards of where the Confederate artillery, all 62 guns, opened up at point-blank range.

The Peach Orchard has the strangest sightings. A small boy in gray and white clothing has been described climbing down a ladder near the orchard fence, with no ladder there when anyone goes to look. Another figure, taller, sometimes described as wearing a torn uniform, has been seen wandering as if wounded and disappearing when approached. The orchard is also where General Johnston bled out under a tree. Visitors don't always know that history when they describe the figures.

Even the replica Shiloh Methodist Church, near the original 1851 log church the battle was named for, has produced reports. Photographers have caught what they say are mists indoors with no obvious source. Several visitors have described the feeling of a hand on the shoulder while standing in the doorway, then turning and finding nothing.

What separates Shiloh from a lot of battlefield ghost lore is the volume of independent accounts and the length of the record. Park staff have been writing the stories down since the 1890s. The drumming has been heard by people who don't know the drummer story. The Bloody Pond went red again last April, peach blossoms or otherwise, and the people who stand at the waterline at dusk leave with their own version.