The Bennington Triangle

Five documented, unexplained disappearances, 1945-1950

Glastenbury Mountain rises over a stretch of southwestern Vermont that has been nearly empty for a century. Glastenbury and neighbouring Somerset were once logging and industrial towns, but they declined in the late 19th century, and in 1937 the state legislature unincorporated both. Between 1945 and 1950 five people went missing in the woods and roads around them, and the writer Joseph A. Citro later named the area the Bennington Triangle.

The first was Middie Rivers, a 74-year-old outdoorsman who knew the country well. In November 1945, while hunting in Bickford Hollow near Woodford, he was last seen walking away from camp; soldiers from Fort Devens and the State Guard searched, and the only trace ever found was his handkerchief. On 1 December 1946 Paula Jean Welden, an 18-year-old sophomore at Bennington College, set out in a red jacket, jeans and light sneakers for what she called a long walk, hitchhiked to the Long Trail where it crossed Route 9, and was never seen again. The search drew hundreds of students and townspeople, police from other states, polygraphs, private detectives hired by newspapers and the FBI, and a $5,000 reward, and found nothing. Shirley Jackson, who lived in North Bennington, drew on the case for her 1951 novel Hangsaman.

Three years to the day later, James Tedford, a 68-year-old veteran of the First World War living at the Soldiers' Home in Bennington, boarded a bus home from St. Albans and did not arrive. Legend has him vanishing from his seat, but a man like him may have got off at Brandon, and he was not reported missing for a week. In October 1950 eight-year-old Paul Jepson disappeared from his mother's truck at the Bennington town dump, where the family kept pigs; a bloodhound followed his scent to a road junction, where it ended. Sixteen days later Frieda Langer, 53, an experienced hiker, slipped into a stream near Somerset Reservoir, set off alone to change her clothes and vanished despite a search by up to 300 people and aircraft. Her body turned up the next May beside the Deerfield River, too decayed to show how she died.

That same autumn the Bennington Evening Banner wondered whether the region held a Lost Horizon, and the disappearances have gathered stories ever since, from a serial killer to a Bigfoot-like Bennington Monster. Some cases have plainer explanations: Langer had a seizure disorder and the cold may have brought one on, and Tedford's story has a week-long gap. The Long Trail still crosses the mountain, and as recently as 2008 a Bennington College student got lost there and was found safe by state police.