Paula Jean Welden
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Paula Jean Welden (1928-?) was a Bennington College, Vermont, USA, sophomore whose unexplained vanishing while on a day-hike on Vermont's Long Trail hiking route on 1 December 1946 has remained unsolved. Despite repeated searches of the then Long Trail section between Vermont State Route 9 at Woodford Hollow, a few miles east of Bennington, and Glastenbury Mountain some 10 miles further north, no clues to Paula's disappearance were ever found.
Paula was the eldest of four daughters of the well-known industrial engineer and designer William Archibald Welden (1900-1970) and his wife Jean, née Douglas, of Stamford, Connecticut. W. Archibald Welden was employed by the Revere Copper and Brass Company and a designer of many household utensils as well as stylish cocktail shakers and other objects.
It is known that Paula hitched a hike from State Route 67A near the entrance to the Bennington College grounds in North Bennington to a point on State Route 9 near the Furnace Bridge between downtown Bennington and Woodford Hollow. She was later seen walking in the direction of Mt. Glastenbury on the then stretch of the Long Trail (the present Long Trail Road/Harbour Road) in the vicinity of the Fay Fuller Camp, and spoke to a group of people asking for directions to the Long Trail and Mt. Glastenbury. It is presumed that Paula must have continued her walk along the then Long Trail along the Bolles Brook Valley, although there are no known confirmed sightings of her past the Fay Fuller Camp.
What is curious about this is that Paula was known to have had considerable prior knowledge about this part of the Long Trail and the Mt. Glastenbury area in general. She was an avid hiker and amateur botanist and had been hiking this section of the Long Trail before on her own and with friends on several occasions. On this basis there would simply have been no good reason for her to ask people for directions for the Long Trail, unless she for some reason wanted to draw attention to herself being there.
This has led some people to believe that Paula might in fact have had a secret, pre-arranged assignation with someone at some point on the Long Trail between the Fay Fuller Camp and Mt. Glastenbury. The fact that she was underdressed for the rather inclement weather this late Sunday afternoon on 1 December 1946 has also intensified the theory that she did not, in fact, expect to have to brave the elements for such a very long time before possibly finding refuge in a car or a log cabin as a prelude to starting a new life somewhere else.
Yet another fact which points in this direction is that Paula is said to have told a college friend some time before her vanishing that she wanted to be less dependent on people and that there would soon be a "new" Paula. Prior to her disappearance she had been preoccupied for some time and had refused to return home for the Thanksgiving holidays in 1946, instead opting to stay on at Bennington College. On the Saturday night before the day of her vanishing she had, however, been in unusually high spirits, according to her college friends.
In the same general area where Welden disappeared, at least another five unexplained vanishings took place between 1942 and 1950. Only one body was subsequently found in puzzling circumstances. Due to the strangeness of these events Vermont broadcaster and author Joseph A. Citro has dubbed the wilderness area northeast of Bennington "the Bennington Triangle" in a direct reference to the unexplained disappearances of ships and airplanes in the supposed "Bermuda Triangle" of the Caribbean. Paula Welden was declared legally dead in 1956. Her real fate remains a complete mystery to this day.
[edit] Literary and media connotations
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), famous for her gothic horror stories, was inspired to some extent by Welden's vanishing when she wrote her novel The Hangsaman (1951). At the time of Paula's disappearance in 1946, Shirley Jackson was living in North Benningon, Vermont, where her husband was employed at Bennington College. Jackson's short story. "The Missing Girl" (included in "Just An Ordinary Day", the 1996 collection of her previously unpublished/uncollected short-stories), also contains oblique references to the Welden case.
The film What Lies Beneath is loosely based on Welden. A novel by the horror, fantasy and science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is thought to be inspired by the legends surrounding Glastenbury Mountain.
[edit] References
- "Into Thin Air" (Paul Begg, 1979)
- Fate Magazine (July 1957)
- Bennington Banner, Bennington, Vermont
- Books by Joseph A Citro
- Shirley Jackson Papers (Library of Congress, Washington DC)
