By Tim Binnall
While the Bermuda Triangle may get the lion's share of attention when it comes to areas where strange disappearances occur, there's an eerily similar region in the state of Vermont. YouTube channel Top5s has put together a collection of five of the creepiest cases of people who vanished while exploring an area that paranormal researcher Joseph Citro calls the 'Bennington Triangle.' It is within this swath of land, he noticed, that an inordinate amount of people went missing during a five year period and, more often than not, under very mysterious circumstances.
By far the most baffling case covered in the presentation centers around a man named James Tetford, who disappeared on December 1st, 1949. His tale is particularly perplexing because the retired soldier vanished not while hiking in the wilderness, but while riding a bus! As the story goes, Tetford was on an eight-hour-long journey from the town of St. Albans to his home in Bennington when the weirdness occurred. Although there were around a dozen passengers on the bus during the trip who recalled seeing the man sitting alongside them, Tetford was nowhere to be found when the ride to came to an end.
Making matters all the more bizarre, Tetford left behind his baggage as well as a bus schedule that was on the seat next to where he had been sitting, which suggests that the man did not simply slip off the bus unnoticed, since it's unlikely that he'd have wanted to retrieve his property. And, as you may have surmised by now, the missing traveler was never seen again, leaving many to wonder how he could have disappeared in plain sight without anyone on board the bus noticing that he was gone.
Another case featured in the collection involves a college student named Paula Weldon, who went missing while hiking along Vermont's Long Trail. This disappearance may be the most well-known of the Bennington Triangle incidents as it spawned a massive search and garnered considerable attention from both the media as well as the FBI. Despite the high profile nature of Weldon's plight, the young woman was never found and her story has subsequently become the subject of all manner of rumor and speculation to this very day.