Bennington Triangle

Between 1945 and 1950, at least five people disappeared in the rugged terrain around Glastenbury Mountain in southwestern Vermont. Seventy-four-year-old hunting guide Middie Rivers vanished first, on November 12, 1945, while leading four hunters through Hell Hollow; searchers found only a single rifle cartridge and a handkerchief that may or may not have been his. Eighteen-year-old Bennington College student Paula Jean Welden disappeared on a hike a year later, and the pattern continued until writer Joseph A. Citro grouped the cases together and coined "Bennington Triangle" in the 1990s.

The strangest case belongs to Frieda Langer, a 53-year-old experienced hiker who fell into a stream near camp in October 1950, walked back alone to change clothes less than half a mile away, and was never seen alive again despite one of the largest search efforts in Vermont history. Her body surfaced seven months later, three and a half miles from where she'd vanished, in an area searchers had already combed. No cause of death could be determined. Local folklore had described the surrounding woods as unsettling long before any of these disappearances, drawing on older Native American and settler-era stories about the mountain.

The region's dense, disorienting forest, harsh winters, and genuinely difficult search terrain (Glastenbury Mountain still has no year-round residents) are enough, historians argue, to explain several unrelated accidents and deaths being retroactively linked under one dramatic name decades later. Langer's case is the hardest to wave away with terrain alone: searchers had already covered the ground where she was found, and nothing about how she got there, or why, was ever resolved.

The Long Trail crosses Route 9 here and leads into the wooded Glastenbury Wilderness at the heart of the area's disappearances. It is remote and easy to lose your bearings in, so going prepared and hiking with at least one other person is the sensible approach.