She Went for a Walk on the Long Trail in 1946. Vermont Never Found Her. Paula Welden.

On the afternoon of Sunday, December 1, 1946, an eighteen-year-old college student finished her shift in the dining hall, went back to her room, and changed into walking clothes.

She did not pack a bag. She did not take extra clothes. She did not take extra money.

From everything investigators could tell, she expected to be gone for a few hours.

She walked off campus, caught a ride toward the Green Mountains, and started up one of the most famous hiking trails in America.

Her name was Paula Jean Welden. Nobody has seen her since.

Her disappearance was so badly handled that it changed the way an entire state does policing. And it gave a patch of Vermont wilderness a name that still follows it today: the Bennington Triangle.

Who was Paula Welden?

Paula Jean Welden was born on October 19, 1928, in Stamford, Connecticut. She was the oldest of four daughters.

Her father, William Welden, was an industrial engineer and designer who worked for the Revere Copper and Brass company. Her mother was Jean Welden.

Paula graduated from Stamford High School in 1945. By the fall of 1946, she was a sophomore at Bennington College, a small private college in southern Vermont. She lived in a dormitory called Dewey House. The building is still standing.

She was eighteen years old, about five foot five.

December 1, 1946

The day started normally. Paula worked a shift in the college dining hall. Then she went back to her room and changed.

She walked to the campus entrance and hitched a ride. In 1946, in rural Vermont, that was a common way to get around.

She got a ride from State Route 67A to a spot on State Route 9 near a place called the Furnace Bridge.

There, a local contractor named Louis Knapp picked her up. He drove her to his house on Route 9, about two and a half miles from the Long Trail.

The Long Trail is a hiking trail that runs the length of Vermont, from the Massachusetts border to Canada. It is the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the United States.

From Knapp's house, Paula either walked or caught another ride to the start of the trail at a place called Woodford Hollow. The record does not say which.

The last sighting

Late in the afternoon, Paula met a group of hikers coming down the trail. She asked them a few questions about it.

One of those hikers worked at the local newspaper, the Bennington Banner. Later, when Paula's photo appeared in the paper, he recognized her.

She kept going north, along a stretch now called Harbour Road. Night was falling as she got near its end.

She may have gone into the woods there. Investigators later assumed she followed the valley of a stream called Bolles Brook.

There are no confirmed sightings of Paula Welden past a spot on the trail called the Fay Fuller Camp.

One detail stands out in the record. Her clothing was described as adequate for the weather that afternoon, but not for the drop in temperature that was expected that night. It was December, in the mountains of Vermont.

The empty bed

That night, Paula did not come back to her room.

Her roommate was not alarmed at first. She assumed Paula had gone to the library to study.

The next morning, Paula still had not returned. College administrators started a search of the campus.

She was not there.

The search

Bennington College closed for several days so students and faculty could join the search.

Hundreds of people took part. Volunteers. Family members. National Guard troops. Firefighters. They searched on the ground and from the air. They covered the Long Trail up to Glastenbury Mountain, about ten miles north, along with the trail's side branches and Route 9 from Bennington all the way to Brattleboro.

The newspapers followed every step. On December 4, the headline read, "Search For Paula Welden Centering On Long Trail; Reportedly Seen Sunday." On December 18, crews moved five hundred tons of gravel at an abandoned gravel pit, looking for her. They found nothing.

In January 1947, the search was renewed.

No clue to where she went was ever found.

A state without state police

Paula's father, William Welden, was furious about how the case was handled. And he was not the only one.

At the time, Vermont did not have a statewide police force. Early clues in the case were the responsibility of the county state's attorney and the county sheriff. Local sheriffs were widely criticized for mistakes in the investigation. Paula's father argued that the lack of a state police force, and the lack of training for local sheriffs, had led to a poorly run investigation.

Vermont's governor, Mortimer Proctor, asked the governor of Connecticut for help. Connecticut sent a state police detective named Robert Rundle and a state policewoman named Dorothy Scoville. Rundle set out to interview everyone who had seen her, or thought they had.

Within seven months of Paula's disappearance, the Vermont legislature created the Vermont State Police. In July 1947, the first sixty-one men were sworn in.

The agency that polices Vermont to this day exists, in part, because of this case.

A person of interest

Investigators did focus on one man.

He was a lumberjack who lived on Harbour Road, the road Paula walked along that afternoon. We are not naming him, because he was never charged with anything.

According to the record, he was in an argument with his girlfriend when Paula walked by, and he stormed off in a jealous rage. His account of the rest of the evening changed. He said he spent it alone at his shack. He also said he drove up the trail where Paula was heading. He lied to police several times.

He was a person of interest in 1946, and again when the case was reopened in 1952. He reportedly told at least two people that he knew, within a hundred feet, where she was buried. He later said that was just idle talk.

No body, no crime scene and no forensic evidence was ever found. That line of the investigation ended.

Declared dead

In 1956, Paula Welden was declared dead in absentia, meaning legally dead without a body.

In 1961, the last Vermont detective still looking for her stopped.

Over the years, people have proposed every kind of explanation. That she was in unusually high spirits and ran off to start a new life. That she planned to elope with a secret boyfriend. That she was injured and lost her memory. That she was depressed and took her own life in the woods. That she was kidnapped or murdered.

None of these theories has ever been supported by evidence.

The Bennington Triangle

Paula's case is the best-known of a cluster of disappearances in the same stretch of wilderness, northeast of the town of Bennington, around Glastenbury Mountain.

At least four other people vanished in that area between 1945 and 1950, in cases that were never explained.

Decades later, a Vermont broadcaster and author named Joseph Citro gave the area a name, in a nod to the Bermuda Triangle. He called it the Bennington Triangle.

The name stuck. It has drawn ghost hunters, podcasters and paranormal theories ever since.

But it is worth being clear about what the record actually shows. A young woman went for a walk in the mountains in December, dressed for an afternoon, not for a night. A search began a day late, run by local officials with no real training for it. And the woods of southern Vermont are thick, steep, and very big.

Paula's case also left a mark on American fiction. The novelist Shirley Jackson lived in North Bennington at the time, and her novel Hangsaman, published in 1951, may have been inspired by it. The author Donna Tartt has said Paula's disappearance was one of the inspirations for her novel The Secret History.

What we still don't know

Nearly eighty years later, we still do not know where Paula Welden went after the Fay Fuller Camp.

We do not know if she got lost, got hurt, met someone, or chose to leave. No trace of her has ever been found.

What we know is this. An eighteen-year-old walked into the woods on a Sunday afternoon, expecting to be back before long. And her disappearance was handled so poorly that Vermont built a state police force because of it.

What do you think happened to Paula Welden? And do you think the Bennington Triangle is just a coincidence of geography?