"Bennington Triangle" is a phrase coined by New England author Joseph A. Citro during a public radio broadcast in 1992 to denote an area of southwestern Vermont within which a number of persons went missing between 1920 and 1950. This was further popularized in two books, including Shadow Child, in which he devoted chapters to discussion of these disappearances and various items of folklore surrounding the area. According to Citro the area shares characteristics with the Bridgewater Triangle in neighboring Massachusetts.
Precisely what area is encompassed in this hypothetical "mystery triangle" is not clear, but it is purportedly centered around Glastenbury Mountain and would include some or most of the area of the towns immediately surrounding it, especially Bennington, Woodford, Shaftsbury, and Somerset. Glastenbury and its neighboring township Somerset were both once moderately thriving logging and industrial towns, but began declining toward the late 19th century and are now essentially ghost towns, unincorporated by an act of the state legislature in 1937.
According to Citro's books, stories of strange happenings had been told about Glastenbury and the surrounding area for many years prior to the disappearances in the 1940s, the best-known of which is probably that of Paula Jean Welden in December 1946. Other sources do seem to corroborate that such folklore does appear to date back as far as the late 19th century and perhaps even earlier. This includes the local folk belief that Native Americans regarded the Glastenbury area as "cursed" and avoided it, as well as tales of hairy "wild men" and other strange beasts in the woods.
Five of the people who disappeared in the greater Bennington area were Middie Rivers (1945) a hunter who left his hunting party and went off on his own; Paula Welden (1946), a Bennington College student who hitchhiked her way to the Long Trail; James E. Tedford (1949), a man suffering from dementia who exited a bus before his planned stop; eight-year-old Paul Jepson (1950) who left his mother’s truck while she was feeding her pigs; and Frieda Langer (1950) who went missing while hunting near Somerset Reservoir. No direct connections have been identified that tie these cases together – other than general geographic area and time period.
The Bennington Triangle was discussed in Season 3, Episode 8 of the television program, "William Shatner's Weird or What?". The episode, entitled "Mysterious Vanishings", first aired on July 23, 2012.