The Bennington Triangle

In the southwestern corner of Vermont, east of the town of Bennington, the Green Mountains rise in a dense, dark, rolling wilderness of spruce, birch and maple. In the middle of it is Glastenbury Mountain, and around it a vast, nearly empty stretch of forest. In the nineteenth century, there were logging and charcoal-making towns here. They’re gone now. Glastenbury itself is one of Vermont’s ghost towns, with a population that has hovered near zero for a century.

Between 1945 and 1950, five people disappeared in or near those woods. Four of them were never found.

In 1992, a Vermont writer named Joseph Citro gave the area a name that stuck. He called it the Bennington Triangle.

Middie Rivers

The first disappearance came on November 12, 1945.

Middie Rivers was seventy-four years old, an experienced hunting and fishing guide who knew the mountains around Glastenbury intimately. That day, he was guiding a group of four hunters. As they headed back toward camp, Rivers went on ahead of the group. He was never seen again.

Searchers combed the area for weeks. The only trace they ever found was a single rifle cartridge, found in a stream, which some believed Rivers may have dropped as he bent down to drink.

Paula Welden

The most famous of the Bennington disappearances happened a year later.

Paula Jean Welden was eighteen years old, a sophomore at Bennington College, a small, progressive liberal arts school just outside the town. She was the daughter of a prominent industrial designer from Connecticut. She was intelligent, artistic, and somewhat restless.

On Sunday, December 1, 1946, she finished a shift working in the college dining hall and told her roommate that she was going for a hike on the Long Trail, the famous hiking trail that runs the length of Vermont along the ridges of the Green Mountains. She was wearing jeans, sneakers and a red parka — not much protection for a December afternoon in the mountains.

She hitchhiked from the campus toward the trail. A driver gave her a ride partway. Several people later said they saw her walking toward the trailhead. An elderly man reportedly saw her on the trail, about a hundred yards ahead of him, before she rounded a bend and passed out of sight.

She was never seen again.

The search for Paula Welden was enormous. Hundreds of volunteers, students, soldiers and local residents searched the mountains for weeks. Her father offered a large reward. Psychics were consulted. The FBI was asked to help. Nothing was found — not a shoe, not a scrap of her parka, nothing.

Her disappearance had one lasting consequence. At the time, Vermont had no statewide police force. The search had been chaotic and poorly coordinated, run by local sheriffs and volunteers. Partly as a result of the criticism, Vermont created its first state police force the following year.

James Tedford

Exactly three years after Paula Welden vanished, on December 1, 1949, a man named James Tedford, an elderly veteran who lived at the Soldiers’ Home in Bennington, was returning from a visit to relatives in St. Albans, in the northern part of the state. He boarded a bus to Bennington.

Witnesses said he was on the bus at the last stop before Bennington. When the bus arrived in Bennington, he wasn’t on it. His belongings were still in the luggage rack, and a bus schedule was lying open on his seat.

No one ever explained what happened to him.

Paul Jepson

On October 12, 1950, an eight-year-old boy named Paul Jepson was waiting in his mother’s truck near Bennington, on property where his parents worked as caretakers and kept pigs. His mother left him in the truck for an hour or so while she did her chores. When she came back, he was gone.

A huge search followed. Bloodhounds were brought in. According to some accounts, the dogs followed Paul’s scent to a spot on a nearby highway — the same area where Paula Welden had last been seen four years earlier — and then lost it.

Paul was wearing a bright red jacket. He was never found.

Frieda Langer

Sixteen days later, on October 28, 1950, a fifty-three-year-old woman named Frieda Langer was hiking with her cousin near the Somerset Reservoir, east of Glastenbury, when she slipped and fell into a stream. She told her cousin she would go back to their campsite to change into dry clothes, and would catch up.

She never arrived at the campsite. Searches for her came up empty.

In May 1951, seven months later, Frieda Langer’s body was found near the reservoir, in an area that searchers had already covered. Her body was too decomposed to determine a cause of death.

The Triangle

After 1950, the disappearances stopped. But the legend grew.

Over the decades, people have offered many explanations for what happened in the Bennington Triangle. Some point to the danger of the terrain itself: dense forest, steep ravines, fast streams, sudden changes in weather, and vast areas where a person who fell or got lost could die and never be found. Some believe one or more of the disappearances were the work of a serial killer. Some have suggested that Paula Welden ran away, or that she met someone on the trail.

And some reach for stranger explanations. Native American legends, as retold by later writers, are said to describe the area around Glastenbury as a place where the land “swallows” people. There are local tales of a “Bennington Monster,” a large, hairy creature said to have attacked a stagecoach in the nineteenth century. There are stories of strange lights and odd sounds in the woods.

Joseph Citro, who popularized the name, has always been careful to say that he didn’t know what happened. He simply noticed a pattern, and a place.