A series of eerie disappearances led to the creation of the state police force and birthed a lasting cultural phenomenon.
By Kyle Neece, for the Community News Service
On December 1, 1946, Bennington College student Paula Jean Welden decided to go for a hike on the Long Trail. She hitched rides and walked until arriving at a trail in Woodford Hollow. Along the route, Welden met a group of hikers and asked them a few questions about the trail. Welden continued north into the late afternoon and evening. She was seen near the Fay Fuller camp, a former shelter on the Long Trail, after which she disappeared without a trace.
Welden’s disappearance from that remote, wooded area in Glastenbury wasn’t the first or the last. Between 1945 and 1950, four other people vanished from the area; only one body was recovered.
When short-staffed law enforcement agencies failed to find her, Welden’s case tipped the scales for Vermont to establish a state police force, the last such organization formed in the U.S.
The mysteriousness of the area would later inspire myth and folklore, causing the region to be known today as “The Bennington Triangle.” Decades after these unexplained disappearances, the Triangle remains a cultural phenomenon.
“I’ve interviewed people who’ve had Bigfoot sightings in that neck of the woods, and those are pretty interesting, pretty convincing stories,” said Joseph Citro, a Vermont horror author who coined the nickname Bennington Triangle. “I’m on the verge of believing them.”
Citro named the Bennington Triangle after the Bermuda Triangle, a loosely-defined region in the North Atlantic Ocean bounded by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, which is famous for its urban mythos about vanishing ships and planes. According to Citro, the Bennington Triangle is not a literal triangular area. It’s rather a span of wilderness around Glastenbury Mountain that was home to a number of strange occurrences. While Bennington is nearby, the area is very remote, with dense forest stretching for numerous miles.
Accessing Glastenbury Mountain, the mysterious main point of interest within the triangle, requires a 19-22 mile hike with an elevation gain of over 3,000 feet. The most popular and recommended entrance is the Appalachian Trail via the Long Trail.
Welden’s 1946 disappearance caused weeks of searching, with Bennington College closing for several days, and students and faculty helping in organized searches. Hundreds of volunteers, family members, firefighters and even National Guard troops searched for Welden to no avail.
Ground and air searches concentrated on the Long Trail up as far as Glastenbury Mountain, the trail’s various branches, and along Route 9 from Bennington to Brattleboro. The prevailing theory became that Welden got lost in the woods.
As the search parties faltered, Welden’s father and many others criticized how local law enforcement handled the situation. Welden’s father pointed out that the lack of statewide law enforcement and the lack of training of local sheriffs contributed to the poorly run investigation. Within seven months of the disappearance, in July 1947, the Vermont legislature created the Vermont State Police.
The area’s four other disappearances have only further established its notoriety and mystique.
Middie Rivers, 74, disappeared on November 12, 1945, while hunting in Bickford Hollow. When he failed to return, a search party was launched, and the only evidence found was his handkerchief.
James Tedford, a 68-year-old World War I veteran, went missing on December 1, 1949, but went unreported for about a week. No trace of him was ever found.
Eight-year-old Paul Jepson vanished on October 12, 1950, while helping his mother with farm chores and was never found. Frieda Langer, 53, went missing 16 days later while hiking with her cousin in the woods near Somerset. Seven months later, fishermen found her body three and a half miles southeast of her family’s campsite.
Heather Moser, producer and researcher for the film company Small Town Monsters, said the Triangle is a reminder that missing people are more than just stories.
“It’s easy when you look at history to just see it as a story. But that’s not the case,” she said. “There’s actual people behind it, families that were affected. There are still some family members of these missing people that are alive today.”
Even so, the lore around the Triangle has endured for decades, spawning conspiracy theories that range from alien abductions to a man-eating rock that have been captured in news stories, documentaries, podcasts and YouTube videos.
Jamie Franklin, a historian and curator for the Bennington Museum, put on the “Haunted Vermont” exhibit in 2023, which explored the mysterious area.
“People say when they’re hiking up there, they get an eerie feeling, a feeling that they’re being watched. You know, when they camp overnight, they’ll hear sounds out in the woods,” he said. “Those sorts of first-person narratives get passed around a lot, and so people come to expect that.”
Citro, who has visited the area and contributed to its notoriety, agrees.
“It’s dangerous for a number of reasons, and one is this aura of spookiness that people bring with them when they go there,” said Citro. “They go there kind of expecting things to be weird, and sure enough, they are.”
Vermont State Police Lt. Tyson Kinney, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations commander who oversees the Welden case, doesn’t put much stock in the folklore, saying the spate of disappearances was likely coincidental.
He also emphasized that today, missing persons complaints are a top priority. State police use resources such as K9s, search and rescue teams and unmanned aerial devices to locate any missing people.
As for the Bennington Triangle, Kinney said people should be careful while exploring, but the odds of one disappearing are, in today’s age, lower.
“There’s always a risk of being out in remote areas, where you don’t have access to cell phone service and things like that in today’s world. Obviously, they didn’t have that back then,” he said. “If people are just cautious about where they’re going and what they’re doing, if they tell a friend and they just use common sense, they’ll be okay.”
Reporter’s notebook:
In an attempt to understand Paula Welden’s case better, a friend and I met up on a Sunday in late July to hike Glastenbury Mountain. The hike was about 20 miles round trip with an elevation gain of over 3,000 feet. The ascent was challenging, and my sense of direction was thrown off by the thick trees. We made a wrong turn once at the beginning of the hike and had to relocate the trail, and at one point, we became separated. My friend and I both felt a strange and ominous feeling when we passed the Glastenbury Wilderness marker sign, at respective times. There was a physical change in the landscape; the forest was darker, visibility worsened, and it felt just…weird. My friend and I eventually located each other, completed the hike, and headed back down to the trailhead.
Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship