A twisted serial killer, a vicious creature, aliens or paranormal forces? All possible explanations for the multiple unexplained disappearances which have occurred near an abandoned town.
The 'Bennington Triangle' is an an area of southwestern Vermont which became the setting for a string of spine-chilling missing person's cases.
Between 1945 and 1950, nearly a dozen people disappeared were reported to have disappeared in eerie circumstances.
The mystery triangle was coined by American author Joseph A. Citro, with an obvious reference to the infamous Bermuda Triangle, the loosely-defined and incorporates the Glastenbury mountain and a number of nearby ghost towns.
It's not just people going missing without a trace which is alarming, as there are also unsolved murders, unnatural weather patterns, spooky creature sightings and mysterious plane crashes.
The greater Glastenbury area is now mostly untouched, pristine wilderness - and is considered remote after the nearby towns were abandoned at the end of the 19th century after the end of the logging boom.
Troubling stories have floated around for year, with native Americans reportedly refusing to venture onto Glastenbury mountain through fears that the land was cursed.
There is also a peculiar legend of an enchanted stone in the mountains which is said to open up and "swallow" a human in seconds if it's stepped on.
While that's all myth, there are very real concerns with the area, as the mountainside is littered with unmarked mine shafts that could become graves for those who fall in.
There are also remarkable weather conditions which change at an instant, with people to this day still getting lost in the woods due to the disorienting winds.
But what about the missing persons? What makes them most surreal, is that there is no pattern to the disappearances, with the victims being of all ages, genders and vanishing in drastically different circumstances.
Middie Rivers - 1945
The first disappearance happened on November 12, 1945, when local hunting guide Middie Rivers disappeared.
The 74-year-old was leading a party of four hunters up the mountains around the area of Hell Hollow in the southwest woods of Glastenbury before he was suddenly lost.
Rivers and his son-in-law, Joe Lauzon, were walking together before reaching a fork where they separated.
The experienced Rivers told Lauzon he'd "only be going a short distance" before he would join them at camp for lunch, but he was never seen again.
During an extensive search they found a single rifle cartridge in a stream, leading to speculation that Rivers had leaned over and the cartridge had dropped out of his pocket into the water.
Many still believed that this knowledgeable woodsman would be able to survive and soon surface in town, but it wasn't to be.
Paula Welden - 1946
The most famous case in this list is that of Paula Welden.
On December 1, 1949, the 18-year-old student, a student at Bennington College, set out for a hike on the Long Trail.
Because it was during Thanksgiving break when most students had gone home for the holiday, Welden was walking on her own bear Glastenbury Mountain.
Many saw her depart, including Ernest Whitman, a Bennington Banner employee who gave her directions, and an elderly couple claimed to have seen her on the trail.
According to them, she turned a corner in the trail, and when they reached the same corner she had disappeared.
When Paula didn't turn up to her classes the next day, a massive 1,000 person search party was launched with a $5,000 reward.
Her father criticised the authorities' lack of sophisticated methods in handling the case, which actually served as the catalyst for the founding of the Vermont State Police seven months later.
Despite the extensive search, which also included aircraft, no evidence of her was ever found and the case remains open to this day.
James Tedford - 1949
Exactly three years to the day Welden vanished, James E. Tedford was also lost without a trace.
This is perhaps the most astonishing case of them all, as the 68-year-old veteran seemingly went in a puff of smoke.
Tedford, a resident of the Bennington Soldiers' Home, went to the local bus station after visiting relatives in St. Albans, Vermont.
According to multiple witnesses, including the driver, Tedford got on the bus and was still aboard at the last stop before arriving in Bennington.
But when the bus pulled into the lasts top he had implausibly vanished into thin air while inside the moving vehicle, with his belongings still in the luggage rack and an open bus timetable was on his vacant seat.
He was only reported missing a week later so there could be holes in the accounts, but no trace of him was ever found.
Paul Jepson - 1950
The following year on October 12, 1950, an eight-year-old boy disappeared.
Schoolboy Paul Jepson was playing happily in the family pick up truck when his mother left to go and tend some pigs.
When she got back an hour later, little Paul was nowhere to be seen.
Despite the boy wearing a bright red jacket, the hundreds of people who joined the search party did not get a sight of him.
A New Hampshire sheriff brought in a bloodhound to sniff out the missing boy - and the dog reportedly did catch hold of a scent.
According to one story, the bloodhound lost the trail at a nearby crossroads, the same spot where it was claimed Welden had gone missing four years before.
Paul's father told the Albany Times Union that it was perhaps "the lure of the mountains" that pulled in his missing son, as the boy had "talked of nothing else for days" prior to the disappearance.
Frieda Langer - 1950
Just 16 days later, an experienced hiker who was familiar with the area went missing.
Frieda Langer had been walking on the Somerset area of the Long Trail bordering east Glastenbury with her cousin, Herbert Eisener, on October 28.
During the journey, the 53-year-old slipped and fell into a stream, so decided to go back to their campsite to change clothes.
However, she was never seen by her cousin or her husband at the campsite ever again.
Five searches were conduced over the next two weeks, involving helicopters from the Connecticut Coast Guard and US Army, as well as local aircraft from citizens and the Vermont Aeronautics Commission.
As many as 400 people, including the Massachusetts National Guard, meticulously searched the surrounding areas, but they found nothing.
However, this is the only known disappearance in the Bennington Triangle where a body was eventually found.
Six months later on May 12, 1951, Langer's corpse was found three-and-a-half miles from the campsite in the eastern branch of the Deerfield River.
Weirdly, the area had been searched numerous times several months before but nothing was discovered.
Because of how badly the body had decayed, no cause of death could be determined.
Bennington Triangle theories
So what exactly could be the cause of such carnage?
There are a lot of conspiracy theories, but no one has managed to come up with a solid answer.
Some believe there may be a murderer on the loose, but there isn't any evidence or the usual patterns detected in serial killers.
There was an alleged wild man sighting in 1867, a specter would venture down from the woods and expose himself to unsuspecting women in Glastenbury while holding a gun.
It may also have been the doing of a big cat, such as a lynx, bobcat, or cougar, but the former two are not usually aggressive to humans and there have been no credible mountain lion sightings.
Many are convinced there are paranormal forces at work, backed up by terrifying voices allegedly showing up on dead-air radio, sightings of mysterious figures and unexplained navigation mishaps.
The most probable argument is the weather is the cause, with the area experience swift changes from sun to heavy winds.
There is a very odd inconstant wind pattern on the mountain, with plants growing in strange ways and hikers struggling to navigate.
It could be a case that this caused the missing persons to get lost and die of starvation or hypothermia.
The mountainside is also littered with unmarked mine shafts that may cause hikers who go off-trail to plummet to their deaths.
The only links to the disappearances are the area they happened, similar time of day between 3pm and 4pm, and that they all happened in the last three months of the year.
However, with no proper evidence to go on, it seems the Bennington Triangle will remain a creepy mystery forever.
