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Pathogen circulation among reservoir hosts is a precondition for zoonotic spillover. Unlike the acute, high morbidity infections typical in spillover hosts, infected reservoir hosts often exhibit low morbidity and mortality. Although it has been proposed that reservoir host infections may be persistent with recurrent episodes of shedding, direct evidence is often lacking. We construct a generalized SEIR (susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered) framework encompassing 46 sub-models representing the full range of possible transitions among those four states of infection and immunity. We then use likelihood-based methods to fit these models to nine years of longitudinal data on henipavirus serology from a captive colony of Eidolon helvum bats in Ghana. We find that reinfection is necessary to explain observed dynamics; that acute infectious periods may be very short (hours to days); that immunity, if present, lasts …