Haunted places guide · Glastenbury, Vermont

The Bennington Triangle: Glastenbury Mountain's Unsolved Disappearances

Five people walked into the woods of southwestern Vermont between 1945 and 1950, and only one was ever found. The mystery is real. The monsters and portals are legend.

By The Haunted Rooms Team · Updated November 2026 · How we rate places

3.5/5Haunted Rooms Score

5People missing, 1945 to 1950

9Glastenbury residents in 2020

Our nearest ghost hunt: Fort William HenryMeet the ghosts

East of Bennington the Green Mountains rise into a wide, wet, roadless block of forest centered on Glastenbury Mountain. It is one of the emptiest corners of New England. The town of Glastenbury once had sawmills, charcoal kilns and a short-lived mountain resort; today it has no local government at all, and the 2020 census found nine people living there. The Long Trail and the Appalachian Trail follow its ridgeline.

In the late 1940s this country became the backdrop for a string of disappearances that have never been fully explained, among them an 18-year-old Bennington College student who set off for a walk on the Long Trail and was never seen again. Decades later the Vermont author Joseph Citro gave the area a name that stuck: the Bennington Triangle. This guide sets out what is actually on record, what has been added since, and how to see the place for yourself without becoming part of the story.

Glastenbury: a town the forest took back

Glastenbury was chartered in 1761 by New Hampshire’s governor Benning Wentworth, like so many Vermont towns, but almost nobody wanted to farm its steep, stony slopes; only six families lived there in 1791. Things changed after the Civil War, when Bennington businessmen turned to its timber. Sawmills went up in the 1870s at Fayville and South Glastenbury, and dozens of kilns turned the wood into charcoal for iron furnaces in Shaftsbury and Troy, New York. A trolley line climbed the mountain along Bolles Brook.

At its peak in 1880 the town counted 241 residents, not including transient loggers. In the summer of 1898 promoters opened a resort at South Glastenbury, served by the electric Bennington and Woodford Railroad. That winter a freshet washed out the tracks, and the town never recovered. By 1937 only seven people were left, and the state legislature unincorporated Glastenbury, along with neighboring Somerset. It is still run by a state-appointed supervisor. Most of it now lies inside the Green Mountain National Forest.

The Long Trail, the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the country, runs the length of the town on the crest of the Green Mountains, shared here with the Appalachian Trail. On the summit of Glastenbury Mountain stands a steel fire lookout tower first erected in 1927 and rebuilt in 1975 with materials flown in by helicopter. In 2022 it was closed to the public as structurally unsafe, and the first flight of stairs was removed.

The disappearances

Middie Rivers, November 1945

The first was Middie Rivers, 74, who vanished while out hunting in Bickford Hollow in November 1945. Searchers found nothing at the time; a handkerchief found the next spring was the only trace.

Paula Jean Welden, December 1, 1946

The case everyone knows is Paula Jean Welden’s. She was an 18-year-old sophomore at Bennington College. On the afternoon of Sunday, December 1, 1946, she told her roommate she was finished with studying and was going for a long walk. She left in a red coat with a fur collar, jeans and light sneakers, underdressed for the cold. A contractor, Louis Knapp, gave her a lift on Route 9 and dropped her near his home, a couple of miles from the Long Trail. Residents of Bickford Hollow saw her walking toward the trail, and a watchman, Ernie Whitman, warned her about heading into the mountains so lightly dressed. There are no confirmed sightings of her beyond the Fay Fuller camp.

The search that followed involved hundreds of volunteers, her classmates, firefighters and National Guard troops, by ground and by air, and volunteers raised a $5,000 reward. Vermont had no state police then; her father brought in officers from New York and Connecticut. Nothing was found. A lumberjack who lived on the road, Fred Gaudette, lied to police and later told people he knew where she was buried, then said it was idle talk; no evidence ever backed him up. Welden was declared dead in 1956.

Her case changed Vermont. Criticism of the search led the state to create the Vermont State Police in July 1947, the last such force formed in the country. It also lodged in American fiction: Shirley Jackson drew on it for her 1951 novel Hangsaman, and Donna Tartt has named it as one inspiration for The Secret History.

James Tedford, December 1949

Exactly three years after Welden vanished, on December 1, 1949, James Tedford, a 68-year-old First World War veteran living at the Bennington Soldiers’ Home, disappeared after being seen on a bus from Burlington. The popular telling says he simply vanished from his seat before the bus reached Bennington. The record is murkier: a driver thought a man resembling him may have got off in Brandon, and his disappearance was not reported for about a week. Author Tony Jinks has argued the evidence does not suggest he dematerialized, even if he was never found.

Paul Jepson, October 1950

On October 12, 1950, eight-year-old Paul Jepson vanished from a car at the Bennington town dump while his mother was tending pigs nearby. A bloodhound followed his trail to a road intersection, and there it ended. His father later suggested a driver may have hit the boy and fled, and that his clothes would have blended into the fall leaves.

Frieda Langer, October 1950

On October 28, 1950, Frieda Langer, 53, disappeared near the Somerset Reservoir after falling into a stream. Her body was found in May 1951, miles away. Langer had a seizure disorder; her husband thought the cold may have triggered a seizure, and one investigator believed she drowned and that spring floodwaters moved her body. She is the only one of the five ever found.

The legends that grew around them

Joseph Citro, who coined the name Bennington Triangle, has written about strange lights, an older tradition of oddities around Glastenbury and the Bennington Monster, a large hairy creature that, the story goes, has been seen in these hills since the 1800s. Citro has said he is on the verge of believing the Bigfoot sightings and that people “go there kind of expecting things to be weird, and sure enough, they are.” Bennington Museum historian Jamie Franklin says hikers often describe feeling watched and hearing sounds at night.

Vermont State Police see it differently. Lt. Tyson Kinney told the Community News Service the cases were most likely coincidental, and urged hikers to be careful and to tell someone where they are going. Five disappearances over five years in a huge, rough, thinly settled stretch of forest is tragic, but not supernatural. In 2008 a Bennington College student got lost here too; state police found him safe.

Where to look

• The Long Trail north of Route 9: the route Paula Welden is believed to have taken, starting near Woodford Hollow.
• Bickford Hollow: where Middie Rivers vanished and where Welden was last seen heading for the trail.
• Glastenbury Mountain summit: 3,748 feet, with its 1927 fire tower, now closed to climbing.
• Somerset Reservoir: east of the mountain, where Frieda Langer went missing in 1950.
• The Bolles Brook valley: the old trolley route and the valley Welden is presumed to have followed.

Visiting Glastenbury Mountain

The usual way in is the Long Trail and Appalachian Trail from the Route 9 trailhead east of Bennington. The summit is about 10 miles north, so the round trip is around 20 miles with more than 3,000 feet of climbing: a very long day or an overnight, with a Green Mountain Club shelter three-tenths of a mile south of the summit. The trail is rocky, wet and remote, with little or no phone signal. A student reporter who made the hike for the Community News Service briefly got lost on the way.

Treat it as real wilderness. Carry a map and a light, dress for the weather (the lesson of 1946), and tell someone your route and your return time, as state police advise. The fire tower on the summit has been closed since 2022, so do not plan on climbing it. If you want the story without the hike, the Bennington Museum and the old campus of Bennington College, where Welden was a student, are in town, and the Equinox in Manchester, a famously haunted resort, is about half an hour north.

• Visiting Open to hikers year-round on the Long Trail; the summit is about 10 miles from Route 9 and a long, remote day. The summit fire tower has been closed since 2022
• Ghost hunting National forest wilderness; no organized ghost hunts

Tips for your visit

• Start early: the summit is a 20-mile round trip from Route 9.
• Tell someone your route and return time before you go.
• Bring a paper map; phone signal is poor or absent.
• Do not plan to climb the summit fire tower: it has been closed since 2022.
• Pair the trip with a night at the haunted Equinox in Manchester.

More haunted places nearby

• The Equinox, Manchester: Vermont’s grandest haunted resort, about half an hour north
• Wilson Castle, Proctor: the haunted castle near Rutland, about 90 minutes north
• Haunted places in Vermont: Emily’s Bridge, the Dutton House and more
• Haunted places in Vermont

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the official website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as staff, visitors and investigators tell them, and we say where records contradict a story.

• Wikipedia: Bennington Triangle
• Wikipedia: Disappearance of Paula Jean Welden
• Wikipedia: Glastenbury, Vermont
• Times Argus: How the mysterious Bennington Triangle came to be
• Bennington Banner: After 60 years, student's fate remains a legendary mystery (2006)
• Willhite: Glastenbury Mountain fire lookout history