The Bennington Triangle

The “Bennington Triangle” is not a place on any map. The phrase was coined in 1992 by the Vermont writer Joseph A. Citro, who borrowed the idea from the Bermuda Triangle and applied it to a stretch of woods around Glastenbury Mountain in the south of the state, near Bennington and the Long Trail. The reality behind it is a short run of missing-person cases from the years just after the Second World War, which newspapers of the day, including the Bennington Evening Banner, noticed and compared to the mystery of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

The first case was Middie Rivers, a 74-year-old hunting guide who disappeared on 12 November 1945 while leading four hunters near Hell Hollow Brook, close to the Long Trail. Hundreds of volunteers and soldiers searched for days and found little more than a cartridge. On 1 December 1946, 18-year-old Paula Welden, a Bennington College sophomore, set out to walk the Long Trail in a red jacket and was reportedly seen by several people before she vanished. A reward of $5,000, the FBI and large search parties turned up nothing; her story is said to have inspired Shirley Jackson’s novel Hangsaman. In December 1949 James Tedford, a 68-year-old resident of the Vermont Soldiers’ Home, disappeared during a bus trip back to Bennington, with his belongings left behind. On 12 October 1950 eight-year-old Paul Jepson vanished from his mother’s pickup while she tended animals; bloodhounds followed his scent to a crossroads and lost it. A few weeks later, 53-year-old Freida Langer, an experienced hiker camping at the Somerset Reservoir, fell in a stream, went to change, and never returned. Her body was found in May 1951 in an area that had already been searched, and officials could not establish how she died.

Retellings add layers that the record does not. Popular accounts speak of a curse on Glastenbury Mountain, of a stone that swallows people, of a wild creature once dubbed the Bennington Monster, of lights and UFOs. The claim of an Indigenous curse is repeated by writers but is poorly documented and is best treated as a modern story laid over the landscape rather than as Abenaki tradition. A death in 1943, that of hunter Carl Herrick, is often added to the lists although his body was found and the cause was determined.

Without the myth, the cases look quite different. They span five years, victims aged 8 to 74, and very different circumstances: an old guide in hunting season, a student on a winter hike, a man on a bus, a child at a dump or farm, and a hiker at a reservoir. Investigators and later writers have suggested getting lost in fog, rough terrain and old mine shafts, an abduction in the child’s case and, in Langer’s case, a possible medical event such as a seizure. The area was also, by then, almost deserted: Glastenbury had been a logging and charcoal-burning town in the 19th century, and the legislature unincorporated it in 1937, when only seven people lived there.

No ghost is reported in the original cases. Folklore since the 1990s adds claims of unexplained lights, strange sounds, disorienting winds, a hairy creature and a “window” to the unknown on Glastenbury Mountain.

Glastenbury Mountain, the Long Trail near Route 9, Hell Hollow Brook, Bickford Hollow and the Somerset Reservoir area of the Green Mountains.

The cases inspired Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, plus decades of books, podcasts and local-interest articles, with the half-vanished town of Glastenbury often described as a ghost town.