Glastenbury Mountain

Glastenbury was once a working logging and charcoal town; decline set in by the late nineteenth century, and in 1937 the Vermont General Assembly unincorporated it entirely. It is a ghost town in the literal, legal sense — as is neighboring Somerset, which still counts a handful of residents. The mountain between them takes its file from what happened after the town died.

After Rivers came Paula Welden, an eighteen-year-old Bennington College sophomore who hitched a ride up Route 9 on December 1, 1946, asked passing hikers a few questions on the Long Trail, and walked into the dusk. Hundreds searched — law enforcement, family, the FBI, the National Guard, volunteer firefighters — and found nothing. The botched investigation drew such criticism that the legislature created the Vermont State Police in its aftermath. In 1949 James Tetford boarded a bus in St. Albans bound for Bennington; witnesses watched him get on, nobody watched him get off, and he never arrived. In October 1950 eight-year-old Paul Jepson vanished from a local landfill while his mother's back was turned, and Frieda Langer, who had slipped into a stream and gone to change clothes, disappeared over the same ground. Langer was the only one ever found — her body surfaced the following May, too decomposed to say anything. Citro's accounting adds peripheral names: three Massachusetts hunters and a thirteen-year-old Bennington boy, Melvin Hills, from the same decade.

Author Joseph Citro coined the term 'Bennington Triangle' in 1992, gathering the disappearances under one name — but the file's reputation predates the label. Citro traces the oldest accounts to colonial-era reports of Indigenous warnings about the mountain, including a story of a rock that ate people. In 1892 mill worker Henry MacDowell murdered fellow worker Jim Crowley in a drunken fight, was sent to an asylum, escaped, and was never seen again — an early rehearsal for the mountain's specialty.

Local memory has long stocked the woods with lights that do not resolve into sources and sounds that do not resolve into causes. Hikers still report the feeling of being followed on the Long Trail section through here; Citro himself advises visitors not to go alone — advice he gives as an observer of statistics, not a believer in monsters.

The disappearances remain unsolved — all of them. A Bennington College student named Robert Singley got lost in the area in 2008 and was found safe by state police, the ledger's rare happy entry and proof that the institution Welden's case created does occasionally get its man back. The record is five names, one body, and two unincorporated towns. The lore is a mountain that, by the accounting of its own file, has been practicing this since before it was a ghost town.