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"Five persons in five years, mysteriously missing, not knowing whether they are dead or alive is not a record for the state, county, or any town to be proud of. Everyone is watching to see what Vermont will do. If this isn't solved, it will be a disgrace." Those are quotes made by Vermont State's Attorney Edward A. John in 1950.
The cases he was referring to are still unsolved. But rather than call it a disgrace, we now call it the Bennington Triangle.
I'm Carter Roy, and you're listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. Episodes release Wednesdays. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.
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- Hello there, I'm Mike Flanagan, and welcome to Spectre Vision Radio's production of "Director's Commentary." "Director's Commentary" is a deep dive into a film through the eyes of the filmmaker or filmmakers who made it. It combines an in-depth interview format with a classic "Director's Commentary" track, the likes of which used to be common on physical media releases, but sadly are becoming more and more rare these days. Filmmakers talking about film with filmmakers for people who love film.
and filmmakers. The Bennington Triangle is an area of land located in the southwest corner of Vermont. It's centered around Glastonbury Mountain, a 3,700-foot peak that's been casting a shadow over the region for centuries. Author and Vermont native Joseph A. Citro borrowed the term triangle from its more famous counterpart in Bermuda when he first coined it.
According to him, the area has been haunted by stories of "mysterious lights, untraceable sounds, and unidentifiable odors" since pre-colonial times. He claims the local indigenous people believe the mountain was cursed. They refused to live on it and rarely ever traveled there, except to bury their dead.
Nowadays, the Bennington Triangle is most famously associated with a string of five disappearances that took place over the course of five years from 1945 to 1950. But reports of bizarre occurrences started much earlier than that. One story that's often referenced goes like this: Sometime in the 19th century, a stagecoach and its passengers are passing through the mountain when they get caught in a storm.
Forced to stop, the driver steps down off the coach, taking his rifle with him and notices large footprints in the mud. They seem to be freshly made by something with an unusually large gait. The driver calls out to his passengers to come take a look, but as he does, his horses spook and rear up. There's a loud thumping noise and the stagecoach topples over.
The driver and his passengers huddle together and find themselves staring into the glowing eyes of a creature, watching them from the brush. It lets out a roar before disappearing into the night. It's not the first tale of its kind, nor is it the last. In 1879, two hunters run into a strange creature in the mountains of Vermont. It has wild eyes and looks like a man.
except for the fact that it's covered head to toe in bright red hair. One of the hunters tries to shoot the creature, but it ends up chasing them. The men get so scared they abandon their weapons and hightail it out of there. Their story appears in the New York Times the next day. Many more similar accounts suggest the possible existence of a Bennington monster, the Vermont equivalent of Bigfoot,
But while they may be true, more than monsters have been known to terrorize the area. In 1867, a so-called wild man appears in Bennington. Accounts claim he comes out of a lair at night to harass and terrify women. He chases them through the dark and appears in their windows, carrying three different guns and a large dagger. One report describes him as being, quote,
tinged with a species of lunacy. In 1892, a mill worker in Glastonbury named Henry McDowell murders his co-worker in a drunken fight. He's sentenced to life in a mental hospital for the quote "insane criminals of the state." But McDowell doesn't spend much time there. He escapes the facility and goes on the run.
Rumors spread that he returns to Glastonbury and hides out in its vast wilderness. He's never found. Around this time, Glastonbury goes through some major hardships. The industries that once kept the town alive, coal and timber, die out. The economy suffers, and there's a mass exodus of people. Attempts are made to revitalize the area. Officials try to fix an old railroad to bring business back.
But it doesn't go to plan. A massive flood wipes out all the progress in 1894. Glastonbury turns into a ghost town. So much so that by 1937, the state removes all government infrastructure. It's no longer considered a town in any official capacity.
We don't know exactly how many people live there today, but in 1996, only four lived in the area full-time, and they all belonged to the same family. According to census records, that number grew to nine in 2020, about one person for every 7,000 acres of land. Today, there are only two access points into Glastonbury,
a dirt road that lasts for about two miles, and a hiking path that travels along the ridge of the Green Mountains. It's called the Long Trail, and it runs the entire length of the state, but passes straight through Glastonbury and past an area known as Bickford Hollow, sometimes called Hell Hollow. In 1945, it's where 74-year-old Middy Rivers goes missing.
On November 12th, Mitty and his son-in-law Joseph are camping in the woods of Glastonbury with three other friends. Around 7:30 a.m., they leave their camp to go deer hunting. They hike until they reach a fork in the trail, and that's where Mitty parts ways. He says he'll meet everyone back at camp for lunch and goes off on his own. Mitty knows the area exceptionally well. He worked as a hunting and fishing guide for years.
But when Middy doesn't return to camp by 3 p.m., Joseph and the others start to worry. They look for Middy until dark, firing shots in the air and calling out his name. But there's no sign of him anywhere. The good news is the weather is unusually mild for the time of year. Middy may be 74, but he's in good health and knows how to survive in the wild. The bad news is he has no food with him.
just a gun, a handkerchief, some ammo, a few matches, and his smoking pipe. Authorities are alerted the next day. They comb the woods for hours, then days. Mitty was last seen wearing a gray wool sweater, a red and black plaid coat, and brown wool pants.
The search is eventually aided by state police, soldiers from the U.S. Army, the Boy Scouts of America, and paid volunteers. Friends even reach out to psychics for help. But the Bennington Banner reports that, quote, The search is called off before winter hits.
Months later, a hiker finds a blue handkerchief with 30 cents wrapped inside that reportedly belonged to Middy. But Middy himself is never found. His body is never recovered. And just over a year later, officials find themselves working another disappearance. In the winter of 1946, Paula Weldon is a sophomore at Bennington College. The campus is about a 30-minute drive from Glastonbury.
On Sunday, December 1st, Paula finishes her shift at the dining hall and returns to her dorm room. She tells her roommate she needs a break from her studies and wants to go on a hike. She leaves campus that afternoon wearing a bright red parka, blue jeans, and sneakers, what would be considered underdressed for the weather. She steps outside the school gates and sticks her thumb in the air to hitch a ride to Glastonbury Mountain.
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On December 1st, 1946, a driver named Louis Knapp picks up a 5'5 female hitchhiker with blonde hair on the road just outside Bennington College. It's Paula Weldon. She's trying to get to the long trail hiking path. Knapp lives in that direction, so he offers to take Paula as far as his house, which is about three miles away from the trailhead. She accepts. According to Knapp,
Paula doesn't talk much during the drive, but there's nothing unusual about it. She appears to be in a good mood. Apart from being a little underdressed for the weather, everything's normal. When they reach Nap's house, Paula thanks him for the ride and continues on to her destination. It's possible Paula hitchhikes again. Witnesses later see her down the road, walking quickly toward the trailhead and thumbing for another ride.
But all we know for sure is, by 4:00 PM, Paula makes it to the mountain. Around that time, she talks to a group of hikers near Bickford Hollow, the same area where Middie Rivers went missing. Paula asked them for directions to the Long Trail. They tell her she's already on it. They say the trail goes right over the mountain, and if she walks far enough, it'll take her all the way to Canada. And that's basically the end of their interaction.
The group watches Paula continue on along the trail. She passes over a nearby bridge and disappears into the woods. The sun sets about an hour later. Then it begins to snow. Sometime after midnight, a couple driving through the area stops to add change to their tires. The roads are slick. Outside their car, they notice fresh footprints in the snow. They look like they were made by a small woman with a flat shoe, about a size five.
Given the hour, the weather, and how isolated the area is, the tracks are concerning. The couple follows them. After about 400 yards, they disappear next to a set of tire tracks, as if the person stepped into a car. But there's no way of knowing whether it was Paula who made those prints. By the time authorities search the area, they're gone, buried by snow.
Paula Weldon is reported missing the next day, and her disappearance becomes major news. In fact, the story stays on the front page of the Bennington Banner for 42 days straight. The investigation is even more extensive than Middie River's. Officials pull out all the stops. Bloodhounds are brought in. Helicopters and planes are flown over the area. Rewards are posted.
Volunteers are joined by state officials from Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut, the National Guard, the Boy Scouts of America, the FBI even gets involved at some point. But no evidence is ever found. And though they don't know it yet, authorities are only at disappearance two of five. Number three happens exactly three years after Paula, to the day.
At the end of November 1949, James E. Tedford visits family in Franklin, Vermont, but he lives in a retirement community for veterans in Bennington. James is 68 years old and served in World War I. On the morning of December 1st, James boards a bus headed back to Bennington along US 7, a route that will take him straight through the heart of the Triangle.
The bus makes stops along the way. In fact, at the stop right before his, James runs into someone he knows and they have a quick conversation. Witnesses see him get back on the bus. But when it arrives that evening in Bennington, all the passengers get off except James. His suitcase is apparently still on the bus and an open bus schedule sits in his empty seat. But James is gone.
He was last seen wearing an army overcoat and gray suit, but no one goes looking for him right away. His family assumes he made it back to the soldier's home, and the soldier's home assumes he's still with his family. There's eventually an investigation, but like the others, it doesn't lead to answers. And it's less than a year before disappearance number four. On October 12th, 1950,
Margaret Jepson drives her truck to the Bennington town dump. Margaret takes care of the property and its 65 pigs. She brings her eight-year-old son Paul with her on the errand. It's raining when they arrive around 3:00 p.m. She tells Paul to wait in the cab while she finishes her chores. When Margaret returns about 30 minutes later, Paul's gone. At first, she assumes he just went outside to play.
But she looks and can't find him anywhere. She contacts authorities shortly after 5:00 PM. Paul was wearing a red sweater, overalls, and rain boots when he disappeared. A bloodhound tracks his scent from the town dump to a fork in the road down the way. It abruptly ends right where the road splits, as if Paul stepped into a car or vanished into thin air.
Officials find a pair of men's gloves on some rocks close by. It could be a connection or just a coincidence, but they never find out. Just two weeks later, they're dealing with disappearance number five. Frida Langer spends the weekend of October 28th on the eastern side of Glastonbury Mountain at her family camp. She's there with her husband, Max, and her cousin, Herbert. That afternoon,
Frieda and Herbert decide to go on a hike to hunt some partridge. Max stays behind to nurse his rheumatic knee. Frieda and Herbert leave camp around 3:00 p.m., but they don't get very far. Around 3:45, Frieda slips and falls into a stream. She laughs about it at first, but it's late October and she shouldn't stay in wet clothes long. She could catch a chill.
So, she tells Herbert that she'll run back to camp, change, and catch back up with him. Herbert walks most of the way back with her until they're about 150 yards away, then goes back to hunting. When Freda doesn't join him again, Herbert assumes she must have stayed at camp, but when he returns there around 4:45, Freda's missing. Max says he hasn't seen her. Nobody has.
The search for Frida Langer is the largest and most intensive of all. It starts in earnest that evening and carries on well into November. Frida was last seen wearing a red woolen shirt, a brown jacket, brown pants, and knee-high hunting shoes. The Bennington Banner reports, quote,
One of the things hard to explain is how Mrs. Langer could have become so completely lost in an hour's time before dark in an area she was so thoroughly familiar with. The Langers had owned that camp for ten years. They spent nearly every weekend there. Stranger still, a bloodhound tracks Frida's scent from the stream where she fell straight back to the camp.
suggesting she possibly made it all the way to its back door before vanishing. Vermont state's attorney declares that if Frida's disappearance isn't solved, it will be a disgrace. The state director of public safety tells his officers they must stay on the job until they find her dead or alive. But like all the other cases, no real evidence is found. The search is called off before winter,
and Frida's family gives up hope that she's still alive. It's the last of the five major disappearances tied to the Bennington Triangle, but there's one thing that sets Frida's case apart from the rest: her body is eventually found. On May 12, 1951, two fishermen in Vermont find Frida Langer's body.
It happens near the flood dam of the Somerset Reservoir, about three and a half miles from where she was last seen. She's submerged in about a foot of water and surrounded by weeds and tall grass. She's lying on her back in what accounts describe as gruesome condition. One hand is missing and her head is mostly a skull. But because her jacket was buttoned up to her chin, the rest of her body is more intact.
It takes a while for officials to remove the waterlogged corpse from the dense woods, but a doctor later determines Frida likely died of an accidental drowning. Investigators suspect she slipped and fell into a deep waterhole. Her body was hidden until spring weather thawed the area. Turns out, 18 months before she disappeared, Frida had an operation to have a brain tumor removed.
prior to that surgery she suffered from periodic fainting spells and blackouts officials suspect maybe she hit her head when she fell in the stream and it caused her to become disoriented but the truth is no one really knows what happened to frida what her final hours were like how long she survived who or what she ran into
There's been a lot of speculation around the Bennington Triangle disappearances. Besides location, there's very little that connects them. A 74-year-old hunter, an 18-year-old college student, a 68-year-old war vet, an 8-year-old kid, and a 54-year-old wilderness enthusiast most disappeared in a six-mile radius of each other.
The only possible outlier is James Tetford. His bus route took him through that area, but there's no record of when he actually disappeared. All five went missing in late fall/early winter, but three years passed between some cases, while only two weeks passed between others. Four out of the five were all wearing the color red: Mitty, Paula, Paul, and Frida. But what would that have to do with anything?
The only real through line is, each one seemed to vanish into thin air. Hundreds of people searched the woods for them, usually without delay. Middy Rivers and Frida Langer were both experienced outdoors people who knew the area well. Middy had matches, a gun, and ammunition on his person. He would have known to start a fire or fire his rifle in the air if he got lost to let people know his location.
Freda was essentially steps away from home and had at least a gun on her. And yet, the only real piece of evidence found in the investigation was a handkerchief that reportedly belonged to Mitty. There were no clear footprints, no temporary shelters, nothing. The same could be said for the others. There's a theory that those footprints in the snow belonged to Paula Weldon and that she might have gotten into a car, but she was last seen on the Long Trail.
For all we know, she could have walked to Canada or been swallowed by the forest right after crossing that bridge. In Paul Jepson and Frieda Langer's case, bloodhounds tracked their scents until they abruptly disappeared. Paul's at a fork in the road. Frieda's right outside the back door to her camp, which is almost as strange as disappearing in a confined space like a bus.
which is what accounts suggest happened to James Tetford. Did any of them mean to disappear? Paula Weldon had no love interest that anyone knew about. She was in good standing at the school. She reportedly told her roommates she'd been struggling with her mental health recently, but her family didn't suspect that had anything to do with her disappearance. If she intended to go missing, she could have made it easier on herself.
Bennington College required students to sign a form if they planned to be off campus later than 11 p.m. If Paula signed the form, the school might not have raised alarms so quickly, but she never did. For some reason, on a late afternoon in December, right before the sun set and a storm was about to hit, the Woods were just calling to her. At the very least, the Woods apparently called to Paul Jepson, too.
His parents claimed he had run away before. Paul's father is cited in newspaper reports as saying his son had previously expressed the urge to go into the mountains, which is a pretty strange thing for an eight-year-old to communicate. Before James Tetford disappeared, he delivered a similarly ominous message. He told some people at the soldiers' home that he wouldn't return from his trip,
Maybe he had an inexplicable feeling that something strange was about to happen, or maybe he planned his vanishing act. That's one theory. Accounts suggest James wasn't in good health and was "thin to the point of emaciation." His family also told police that he seemed particularly despondent during his visit with them, but there are many more theories where that came from.
The list is particularly long for Middie Rivers. Despite his apparent good health, some believe he might have suffered a stroke or heart attack, others that he had an accident. He slipped and fell, maybe down one of the many old wells in the area, or into a river and drowned. One persistent theory is that he was accidentally shot by another hunter, who panicked and hit his body.
That's why investigators couldn't find any trace of him. It had happened before, in that area, to a man named John Harbour. Something similar could have happened to Paula, or Paul. In Paul's case, it might not have been a hunter though. Some suspect he was hit by a car at that fork in the road and the driver hid the evidence. Or that he was kidnapped by someone driving by.
But there are other theories too, like that he ran into one of the six so-called sexual psychopaths who had recently escaped from a New Hampshire mental hospital. Or that he was eaten by the pigs at the town dump. Which, as wild as it sounds, does happen from time to time. It's rare, but pigs have been known to eat humans. Even their owners.
The food chain is more cyclical than you might think. What does any of it mean for the Bennington Triangle? Well, there are theories that attempt to link the five disappearances together. Author Joseph A. Citro claims one or more of the indigenous tribes believed in man-eating stones that would swallow people whole if they stepped in the wrong place. Others have thrown out the idea that they were all victims of the same serial killer.
or that they were abducted by aliens. There were, and continue to be, plenty of UFO sightings in the area. A Vermont farmer who lived near the Green Mountains once woke up one day and found 23 of his 29 cows dead inside his barn. The dead ones were reportedly arranged in a circle with feed still in their mouths, and the ones that were still alive were just standing there.
hanging out. A vet determined they had all been instantaneously electrocuted. But by what? They were all inside a barn, which had no signs of damage. Two different witnesses reportedly saw a UFO in the area that same night. Others have suggested they ran into the Bennington Monster,
and we spoke about a few sightings earlier, but accounts of a Bigfoot-like creature in the area have continued on well into the 21st century. And just two years before Middie Rivers disappeared, a hunter was found dead in Vermont who had apparently been crushed by some sort of animal. Large tracks were found nearby and he had scratches on his body. Reports concluded that he was killed by a bear, but not in the way you would think.
He allegedly died from being, quote, squeezed to death. And not only that, but it was suggested that the bear hugged him once, dropped him, and then went back to squeeze him a second time. Now, I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like any bear attack I've read about. Bears hug each other in the wild to show affection, but they have much more efficient ways of ending a human's life.
So, is the Bennington Triangle just a series of coincidences? Or is there something legitimately strange happening in southwestern Vermont? I would say most people lean towards coincidence. But then again, most of them probably haven't visited Glastonbury Mountain. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast.
We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story and the official story isn't always the truth.
This episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson. Fact-checked by Laurie Siegel and sound designed by Kelly Geary. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson. And Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
