Five Vanished Near Glastenbury: The Bennington Triangle

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 15, 2026 · How we verify

Five people vanished from the same stretch of southwestern Vermont in the space of five years, and the phrase Bennington Triangle was invented decades later to hold them all together. The name belongs to author Joseph A. Citro, who devoted chapters to the disappearances and to the folklore of the surrounding hills, and who compared the region to the Bridgewater Triangle in southeastern Massachusetts. The cases themselves are real, documented, and mostly unsolved. Nearly everything else attached to them is story.

Getting Your Bearings Around Glastenbury Mountain

• Where: No fixed boundary exists. The area is described as centred on Glastenbury Mountain and taking in some or most of the towns immediately around it, especially Bennington, Woodford, Shaftsbury and Somerset.
• When: The disappearances run from November 1945 to October 1950.
• The record: Of the five people who went missing, only one body was ever recovered.
• Access: Open forest, hiking trails and reservoir shoreline. The Long Trail runs through it.

Two Towns That Emptied Out

Glastenbury and its neighbouring township of Somerset were once moderately thriving logging and industrial towns. Both began declining toward the late 19th century, and both are now essentially ghost towns; the Vermont General Assembly formally unincorporated them by an act in 1937. That is the practical backdrop to every one of the disappearances: a landscape that had already been worked over, abandoned, and left to grow back, laced with old roads and camps that lead nowhere in particular.

It is also unforgiving terrain for anyone who loses the trail. In 2008, Robert Singley, a 27-year-old Bennington College student, got lost in the area and was found safe by Vermont State Police. He is the counter-example the legend rarely mentions.

The Five Cases, 1945 to 1950

Middie Rivers, November 1945

The first disappearance came on November 12, 1945. Middie Rivers, 74, vanished while hunting in Bickford Hollow, roughly four miles east of Bennington and north of Vermont Route 9 near Woodford. Rivers was a skilled outdoorsman, a regular at his son-in-law’s hunting camp on the Long Trail, and described by friends as thoroughly familiar with the ground. A friend saw him on a nearby trail around 4 PM, walking away from camp. He never came back.

Searches that autumn drew volunteers from Fort Devens and the Vermont State Guard. One search party leader expected to find remains, noting that plenty of people had been lost in the region over the previous decades and all had eventually turned up. The only trace ever found was Rivers’ handkerchief, picked up by a hiker the following spring along a trail south of where he was last seen.

Paula Jean Welden, December 1946

The best-known case. Welden, 18, a sophomore at Bennington College, was last seen on December 1, 1946, about two miles south of where Rivers had disappeared the year before. She left campus early in the afternoon and travelled six miles on foot and by hitchhiking to the Long Trail, which at that time crossed Route 9 near Harbour Road. A local man gave her a ride to a point on Route 9 about two miles west of the trail. Other witnesses said they met her on or near it, including a Bennington Banner employee who gave her directions.

She was wearing a red jacket, jeans and lightweight sneakers, with no camping gear and nothing suited to freezing weather. When she missed class the next morning, a large search followed, along with a $5,000 reward and help from the FBI. No trace of her was found. Her disappearance inspired Shirley Jackson’s 1951 novel Hangsaman.

James Tedford, December 1949

Tedford, 68, a World War I veteran living at the Vermont Soldiers’ Home in Bennington, went missing on December 1, 1949, three years to the day after Welden. Relatives in St. Albans walked him to the bus station and watched him board a southbound bus. The last confirmed sighting was at the Burlington depot, where he spoke briefly with an acquaintance before transferring to a Bennington-bound bus at about 6:15 PM.

The popular version has him vanishing from a moving bus. The paper trail is messier. The driver later told police that a man resembling Tedford may have got off in Brandon, some 70 miles north of Bennington, and Brandon police that same night looked into a report of a man matching his description behaving oddly downtown. His absence went unreported until the superintendent of the Soldiers’ Home contacted police on December 8. Newspapers reported that Tedford was mentally ill at the time, and his family said he was despondent about returning to Bennington. Writer Tony Jinks has pointed out the week-long gap between the last sighting and the report, and argues there is enough evidence to suggest he did not dematerialise, even though no trace of him was found.

Paul Jepson, October 1950

On October 12, 1950, eight-year-old Paul “Buddy” Jepson, a special needs child, disappeared while out with his mother on farm chores. She drove him to the Bennington town dump, where the family kept a herd of pigs, and left him in the vehicle for around 30 minutes. When she returned at about 4 PM he was gone.

Searchers concentrated on the dump and the woods around it. A bloodhound followed his scent along an adjacent road to an intersection, where the trail stopped dead. Police suggested rain had washed the scent away. His father raised the possibility that a driver had struck the boy and removed him in a panic, and also noted that searchers could easily have missed him in the woods because his brown and tan clothing matched the fall leaves.

Frieda Langer, October 1950

Sixteen days after Jepson, on October 28, 1950, Frieda Langer, 53, went missing in the woods near Somerset. An experienced hiker and hunter, she had travelled that morning from her home in North Adams with her husband Max and her cousin Herbert Elsner to the family cabin on the shores of Somerset Reservoir. Hiking with Elsner around 1 PM, she slipped into a stream and soaked her clothes, told him she would take a shortcut back to the cabin to change, and said she would catch up.

The search that followed used aircraft, helicopters and as many as 300 people. Langer suffered from a seizure disorder, and her husband thought the cold might have triggered a seizure and left her disoriented. On May 12, 1951, fishermen found her body three and a half miles southeast of the campsite, on the shore of the eastern branch of the Deerfield River, in ground that had only been lightly searched. Her remains were too deteriorated to establish a cause of death. One investigator theorised she had fallen down an embankment into a deep pond, drowned, and been flushed out months later by a spring freshet.

How the Cases Became a Triangle

The linking began while the last searches were still active. Covering the Jepson case in 1950, Bennington-area journalists noted the three earlier disappearances and speculated about a connection. That November the Bennington Evening Banner ran an article suggesting the region might contain a “Lost Horizon”, a nod to James Hilton’s 1933 novel about travellers lost in a mystical mountain region of Tibet. Citro’s books, particularly Shadow Child, later gave the cluster its name and its shape.

Broadcast attention has kept it circulating. The 1945 to 1950 events are the subject of episode 67 of the podcast Lore, titled “The Red Coats”, and the area appeared in the Travel Channel series Most Terrifying Places in America in 2018, in an episode called “Unnatural World” that paired the disappearances with local tales of a Bigfoot-like creature said to roam the woods.

The Bennington Monster and the Older Stories

Strange happenings had been reported around Glastenbury and its neighbouring country long before the 1940s, and the folklore should be read as folklore rather than record. Local tradition holds that Native people avoided the mountain except for burials, considering it cursed by warring winds. The Bennington Monster, the Bigfoot-like figure of regional legend, is said to have been reported as far back as the early 19th century, in an account of an attack on a stagecoach. Other stories describe lights moving over the ridges, sounds with no source, and voices urging violence, including an 1892 tale of a sawmill worker who killed after hearing whispers. None of these has documentary support in the way the missing person files do, and treating them as evidence for the disappearances is a choice, not a conclusion.

Walking the Ground Yourself

There is no gate, no visitor centre and no marked boundary. What you can visit is the landscape: Glastenbury Mountain, the Long Trail that crosses it, Route 9 through Woodford, and the shoreline of Somerset Reservoir where the Langer party kept their cabin. The former townships of Glastenbury and Somerset offer little to look at beyond overgrown remnants of a logging economy that collapsed more than a century ago.

Treat it as backcountry, because that is what it is. Rivers knew the ground and did not come back. Langer was a capable hiker who left the trail for a shortcut of a few hundred yards. Singley, in 2008, needed the Vermont State Police to find him. Carry proper gear, tell someone your route, and take the weather seriously. Whatever the Bennington Triangle is or is not, the forest itself has a documented record.

See The Bennington Triangle for Yourself

Sources

• Bennington Banner 03 Oct 2008, page 21
• Shirley Jackson's Horror Novel 'Hangsaman' Was Inspired By A Real-Life Disappearance
• Disappearing Object Phenomenon: An Investigation
• Bennington Triangle, Definition
• Inside The Unsolved Disappearances Of The Bennington Triangle
• Wikipedia: Bennington Triangle

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