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Blood in the Soil: The Chilling Tale of the New England Vampire Panic

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Centuries after the witch panic in Salem, New England was gripped by another entity – vampires! Thought to crawl out from their graves at night and back to their remaining family to feed and consume the life of them. This has later been known as the New England Vampire Panic The only way to stop them was to dig them up and set them on fire. 

In the quiet, frostbitten corners of 19th-century New England—amid snow-capped fields and rickety clapboard farmhouses—a curious darkness was spreading. But it wasn’t witches this time. It wasn’t demons, or ghosts, or devils hiding in the woods. No, what haunted the good, God-fearing folk of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont was something far stranger.

Vampires.

Not the aristocratic, silk-robed kind with Eastern European accents. Not the seductive, night-stalking vampires of Hollywood imagination. These were homegrown, farm-dwelling, dirt-under-their-nails revenants. According to local belief, they didn’t sip fine blood from crystal goblets. They clawed their way out of graves and siphoned the life from their living kin—not with fangs, but with supernatural persistence.

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This wasn’t just a gothic fever dream. It was real. It had a body count, graves empty after their families dug them up and burnt their remains to cure themselves of the curse of the undead. After it swept across the east coast, it was later called the New England Vampire Panic.

Old Graveyards: A serene graveyard in New Hampshire reflects the eerie history of vampire folklore in early New England that was gripped by fear during the New England Vampire Panic.

A Disease by Any Other Name

To understand how New England came to believe in vampires, we need to talk about tuberculosis—known in the 1800s as consumption.

Before it had a scientific explanation, TB was a horrifying, slow-moving plague. It wasted the body and if you first got infected, there was a two in ten chance of surviving it as there was no cure. Victims grew pale and thin, their cheeks sunken, eyes glassy. They coughed blood. They wheezed and gasped and sometimes appeared to grow stronger just before they died, as if something unnatural were prolonging their suffering.

The White Death: The plague of tuberculosis is a disease that has killed more people than any other microbial pathogen and mummies dating back to the 8000 BCE. Over the years, many attempts to cure it through curious means show desperation. Fresh air, bloodletting, elephant urine, eating wolf livers and human breast milk has from ancient times been tried.

It was contagious, of course, though no one knew why or how. When one family member died, others often followed. Households dropped like dominos. And so the imagination of rural folk—grounded in a stew of folklore, fear, and grim necessity—did what it does best: It reached for reasons.

They began to believe that the dead were not staying dead. 

Vampire Lore: In addition to consumption being rooted in a vampiric infliction, you also had rabies that gave strange symptoms and rare genetic disorders like porphyria that gave a sensitivity to sunlight and reddish teeth. Although in the New England Vampire Panic, it was mainly tuberculosis.

The New England Outback

Exactly why New England? After all, tuberculosis was a worldwide problem, why did the vampiric panic happen here, 200 years after the witch craze in Salem not too far from where they would begin to exhume their loved one from their graves?

There are several factors of how this particular lore and New England Vampire Panic started. One has to do with numbers. After years of civil war, the number of people living in Exeter, Rhode Island for instance, had dwindled to a few thousand, scattered across small rural communities. By some, this was later known as Vampire Capital of America and had a high count of exhumations like the case of Mercy Brown. 

Contrary to popular belief about being puritanical, the rural New Englanders in the 1800s were not overly religious and 10 percent belonged to church in these parts. Missionaries were sent to these parts to get them back to God’s words as they saw these rural communities living in cultural isolation from the rest of the world.. 

The belief of the uneducated farmers have taken hold for many in later years. But was it really so? It seems like many places like Manchester, Vermont where Rachel Burton was exhumed and burned on the town square was founded by educated and not really the most superstitious and religious men. This seems to have changed after the Revolutionary War when it was then described as a place of drinking gambling, and superstitions like vampirism. 

Read More: The Vampire of Rachel Burton: Vermont’s Gruesome 18th Century Exhumation

They were however superstitious and let their beliefs fester side by side with the industrial revolution and modernisation of the society in the cities not far from their farming communities. Also as a small community, there were a lot of relations between the exhumations. Like the case of the exhumation of Nancy Young having relation through marriage to Sarah Tillinghast who was also exhumed the same way. They were neighbors, although the farms were few and far between, family and friends, and like the sickness of consumption, so did the fear of the undead spread and infect through generations and places.

The Curious Case of Mercy Brown

The most infamous case of the New England Vampire Panic took place in 1892, in the icy hills of Exeter, Rhode Island. The Brown family had been ravaged by tuberculosis. First, mother Mary Eliza died. Then daughter Mary Olive. Then son Edwin became ill and left for Colorado in a desperate bid for recovery.

And then Mercy Lena Brown, a 19-year-old girl with dark hair and a shy smile, fell sick and died on January 17, 1892.

Mercy Brown: A historical portrait of Mercy Brown, the young woman at the center of the New England Vampire Panic.

The townsfolk were suspicious. Too many Browns were dying. Someone, or something, must be behind it. They began to murmur. Maybe one of the dead was still feeding. Edwin, now barely hanging on, had to be saved.

So in March—when the ground thawed enough to dig—they exhumed the bodies.

Mary Eliza and Mary Olive had decomposed as expected. But Mercy? Her body, kept in a crypt during the harsh winter, was remarkably intact. Her cheeks had color. There was blood in her heart, clear signs she was the vampire.

The heart and liver were removed and burned. The ashes were mixed into a tonic and given to Edwin to drink. (A sentence that should never be uttered casually, but here we are.)

Read More: Check out The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident in Rhode Island 

Did it work? Tragically, no. Edwin died two months later. But Mercy’s story endured, becoming the poster child of the New England Vampire Panic—a real-life tale so haunting that even Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, reportedly took notes.

Mercy wasn’t the only one. According to folklorist Michael Bell, there was around 80 of these types of exhumations. From Maine to Massachusetts to Rhode Island, similar rituals were performed. Perhaps as far west as Minnesota. Not always with a name. Not always with fire. But the goal was the same: stop the dead from killing the living.

The Vampire Next Door in the New England Vampire Panic

These were not “vampires” as we think of them today, but corpses with unfinished business, still feeding on their living relatives from beyond the grave. They drained vitality, not with teeth, but through a metaphysical link. The only cure? Dig up the body, examine it, and if necessary, destroy the vessel.

Some communities in Maine and Plymouth, Massachusetts, opted to simply flip the exhumed vampire facedown in the grave and leave it at that. But in places like Connecticut, Vermont and especially in Rhode Island, they took it one step further. 

If the corpse was found unusually fresh, with blood in the heart or organs (a not-uncommon occurrence in cold New England graves and those buried in the winter or put in freezing crypts waiting for the ground to thaw), it was declared the source of the curse. The heart would be removed and burned to ash, sometimes the liver, kidney or other organs were also taken. Often, the ritual was done in secret, other times it was done publicly, sometimes on a blacksmith’s anvil or just on a nearby rock in the cemetery. In many cultures it was believed that the fire in a blacksmith’s anvil was a divine gift and that they had the power to banish evil through their metal and flames.

There were also some cases where vines and sprouts growing from the coffins and bodies were seen as signs of vampiric activity, like we see with the exhumation of Annie Dennett. They believed that the vine or root growing at or by the grave reached the next coffin, another family member would be sick and die. This part of the legend is a bit more difficult to trace back to a particular superstition shared with other places.

Read More: The Curious Case of Annie Dennett and the Vampiric Vines 

As the ritual demanded, their heart and liver were burned on a nearby rock and the ashes were mixed with a tonic and given to the sick relatives to drink. Sometimes it was also said to be smoked or the fumes from the burning were inhaled by those attending. 

The Mystery of J.B: Connecticut State Archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, was excavating the cemetery and found something no one could have expected. Among the graves, one burial in particular captured attention: a coffin marked only with brass tacks, spelling the initials “J.B. 55”. The remains inside had been subject to a post-mortem ritual that hinted unmistakably at vampire panic practices during the New England Vampire Panic. // Photo courtesy of Nicholas Bellantoni

After the ritual, it seems like the rest of the body was reburied. In Woodstock, Vermont, a father exhumed the bodies of his daughters and burned them to save his last surviving child. In Griswold, Connecticut, archaeologists discovered 29 burials in the 1990s—one with the skull and thigh bones rearranged in a skull-and-crossbones pattern. The jaw had been hacked apart. The coffin was inscribed with “JB55,” believed to stand for “John Barber,” a middle-aged man who likely died of TB. The mutilation? A post-mortem attempt to stop the spread of vampirism.

Read More: The Griswold Vampire Case and the True Identity of J.B. in the Coffin 

Where did the Vampire Lore come from?

Although it is today known as the New England Vampire Panic, the people at the time didn’t use this terminology as the term was not commonly used in the community. But when the newspapers and outsiders started to look at the phenomenon, they classified it as vampire lore because of the similarities about the lore in eastern Europe dating back to the tenth century. 

There are many versions about where the vampire lore that struck the New England coast around this time. According to residents of Exeter, Rhode Island, they claimed they got the exhumations tradition from the Native Americans that certainly had their own vampire lore. But what about the European connection? 

Vampire Lore in the World: Although New England cultivated its own vampire belief, it certainly wasn’t the first. Across the ocean in Europe, the fear of the vampires in eastern Europe took hold in the 1700 and worked its way west. In Europe the wooden stake was said to be the thing banishing the vampire. In America, they burned their organs showing signs of vampirism. This illustration comes from an 1851 book by Paul Feval titles “Les Tribunaux secrets” and was created by René de Moraine.

In this time, there was also a Vampire panic in Europe, especially eastern and central Europe. German and Slavic immigrants are said to have brought their lore and superstitions with them in the 18th century. There were Hessian mercenaries that served in the Revolutionary War and Palatine Germans colonized Pennsylvania. There were also Germans and different eastern Europeans traveling through the area as healers, bringing with them the ideas of the undead and exhumation as a cure for the terrible diseases the townsfolk didn’t yet understand. 

The Science Arrives too Late for Many

The New England Vampire Panic began to wane by the early 20th century, as germ theory and modern medicine began to explain disease in ways people could trust. TB was finally understood as a bacterial infection, not a curse.

In the meantime, there were as many as 80 exhumed graves we know of, but there were probably many more. For example, in 1862, reports of vampirism swept the community of Saco, Maine so strongly that almost every deceased resident was dug up and reburied, allegedly. Every corpse was, apparently, a suspect.

But the New England Vampire Panic hadn’t been entirely irrational. These were desperate people watching their families die horribly. They didn’t have the benefit of science. They had folk remedies, tradition, and fear—and so they reached for the most ancient tool humans possess: storytelling.

And in the dark corners of New England, those stories had fangs.

List of Vampire Cases of the New England Vampire Panic

1793 – The Vampire of Rachel Burton: Vermont’s Gruesome 18th Century Exhumation

1799 – The Rhode Island Vampire and the Legend of Sarah Tillinghast 

1810 – The Curious Case of Annie Dennett and the Vampiric Vines 

1816-1817 – A Vampire in Ohio: The Strange and Grim Superstition of the Salladay Family 

1817 – The Case of Frederick Ransom: The Woodstock Vampire

1827 – The Legend of the Vampire Nancy Young Rising from her Grave 

1843 – The Griswold Vampire Case and the True Identity of J.B. in the Coffin

1854 – The Jewett City Vampires and the Ray Family in Connecticut

1874 – The Restless Dead of Rhode Island: The Vampiric Legend of Ruth Ellen Rose

1892 – The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident in Rhode Island 

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References:

Food For The Dead The Vampires

Bioarcheological and biocultural evidence for the New England vampire folk belief 

The Great New England Vampire Panic

New England vampire panic – Wikipedia 

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The Vampire of Rachel Burton: Vermont’s Gruesome 18th Century Exhumation

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A cold day in February, the village people in Manchester, Vermont gathered in the square to stop a vampire thought to suck the life out of a young woman. By burying her up and burning her remains, they thought they could fight back the curse of the undead. 

New England, with its brooding forests, craggy hills, and centuries-old graveyards, has long been fertile ground for ghost stories, witch trials, and spectral folklore. But perhaps one of its grimmest and most unsettling chapters comes from a sleepy little village in southern Vermont — Manchester, 1793 — where townsfolk turned on one of their own dead in a desperate bid to halt a creeping, invisible killer: tuberculosis.

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This is the eerie tale of Rachel Burton (née Harris), a woman whose body was unearthed, mutilated, and burned in front of a crowd of hundreds, believed to be a vampire draining the life of her husband’s new wife from beyond the grave. 

The Death of Rachel Harris

In the late 18th century, Captain Isaac Burton, a respected deacon in the local Congregational church, buried his first wife, Rachel Harris, after she succumbed to consumption (the old term for tuberculosis). Consumption was a slow, wasting disease — it could pick off entire families one by one in a cruel, unrelenting sweep. To early New Englanders, it made sense to suspect some supernatural culprit.

We have the story of her, told by Judge John S. Pettibone (1786-1872). Already from this source, a lot of time had passed. She was a young woman, around 20 and was buried around 1792 and described by the judge as “a fine, healthy, beautiful girl”  before her death. The ritual was described in his History of Manchester manuscript from around 1860 under a section titled Tale of the Demon Vampire.

Within a year of Rachel’s passing, Captain Burton remarried, taking Hulda Powell as his second wife. But it wasn’t long before Hulda, too, began to wither away. She suffered the tell-tale signs: a persistent cough, fatigue, night sweats, and alarming weight loss. The similarity of her symptoms to those of Rachel raised superstitious suspicions. In an era without germ theory, people didn’t understand how tuberculosis spread — but they did know when a deathly pattern felt unnatural.

And in New England folklore, there was a chilling explanation for such tragedies: the dead could feed on the living.

The Vampire Cure for Consumption

According to local belief, if a deceased family member was suspected of preying on their kin, there was only one way to stop them. You had to exhume the corpse and destroy the offending organ — typically the heart or liver — sometimes feeding the ashes to the afflicted, or simply burning them in the hopes of severing the connection between dead and living.

Sources vary about when the exhumation took place. Some say it was around three years after Rachel died. Some say that it was In February of 1793, after Hulda’s health worsened, the townsfolk and Burton’s family settled on this morbid course of action. Rachel Harris’s body would be exhumed, and whatever malevolent hold she had over Hulda would be broken in a public ritual.

Accounts suggest that between 500 and 1,000 people gathered at the graveyard in Manchester to witness the ritual — an astonishing turnout for a remote colonial village, but a testament to the grip of fear and superstition on the community. 

It seems like many places like Manchester, Vermont where Rachel Burton was exhumed and burned on the town square was founded by educated and not really the most superstitious and religious men. This seems to have changed after the Revolutionary War when it was then described as a place of drinking gambling, and superstitions like vampirism. 

Leading the ritual was Timothy Mead, while his relative, Jacob Mead, fired up his blacksmith’s forge nearby. The chilling operation was carried out in broad daylight, with Deacon Burton, a religious leader, presiding over the spectacle.

Rachel’s heart, liver, and lungs were removed, though contemporary accounts do not detail whether there was anything particularly ‘unusual’ about the condition of her remains — though it hardly mattered. The ritual was the important part.

The organs were then placed onto Jacob Mead’s blacksmith’s forge and burned to ash in front of the assembled crowd. As the account from 1860 says: “It was the month of February and good sleighing”. The belief was that by burning the vital organs, they would destroy the vampire’s connection to the living and halt the spread of the disease.

Often in these rituals, the sick would ingest the ashes of the burnt parts, often mixed into a tonic for them to drink. It’s not explicitly said, but it’s likely this also happened here. But for what purpose? Hulda Burton died in September of 1793, just months after the gruesome exhumation. The disease had already claimed her, and no amount of superstitious ceremony could stop it.

But the ritual’s failure did little to dissuade similar practices throughout New England. The vampire panic would continue for decades, culminating in famous cases like Mercy Brown’s exhumation in 1892 — a remarkably similar incident a century later, in the same region.

An Eerie Reminder

Today, there’s little to mark the site where Rachel Harris Burton’s grave was disturbed in Factory Point Cemetery in Manchester. Time and weather have worn away many of the old headstones, and the blacksmith’s forge long since cooled. 

In the cemetery, the Vermont Folklife Center put a sign and marker in 2022, commemorating the story of Rachel Harris Burton. Her grave is noticeable because of the distinctive stone that was carved by Zerubbabel Collins, which was a very famous family of carvers.

But if you find yourself in Manchester, Vermont, wandering one of its ancient cemeteries on a fog-laden evening, spare a thought for poor Rachel — accused in death, desecrated in superstition, and forever part of America’s eerie legacy of vampire panics.

After all, history’s most unsettling tales aren’t always buried as deep as we think.

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References:

MANCHESTER VAMPIRE | William G. Pomeroy Foundation 

Manchester commemorates resident ‘vampire’

Manchester Vampire

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The Case of Frederick Ransom: The Woodstock Vampire

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How did a Darthmount student from a prominent family in Woodstock, Vermont end up as a vampire? The story of Frederick Ransom shows that the belief in vampirism or the fear of the undead was not just for the simple and uneducated country folks. 

When you hear the term “vampire panic”, your mind might conjure up foggy rural graveyards, torch-wielding villagers, and folksy farmers digging up their loved ones by lamplight. But history, as it often does, has a way of proving us wrong. This was the case with Frederick Ransom — a well-educated young man from a respected New England family whose story reminds us that fear, especially of death and disease, respects neither class nor education.

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The American writer, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal of 26 September 1859: “The savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a family in Vermont—who, several of its members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs & heart & liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it,”

Most likely he was referring to the vampire case of Frederick Ransom. In the early 19th century, in the cold hills of Vermont, the so-called “vampire panic” wasn’t just superstition; it was desperation along the New England coast. And not even a Dartmouth College education could save Frederick from becoming a posthumous scapegoat for a disease no one yet understood.

A Life Cut Short by Consumption

Frederick Ransom was born into a prominent family as the second son and had seemingly his whole life ahead of him. He grew up in South Woodstock, Vermont with his father Richard Ransom and Elizabeth Mather with loads of siblings. By the standards of his day, he was part of New England’s educated elite — a college student at Dartmouth. But tuberculosis, known ominously as consumption, didn’t care about family names or academic ambitions.

In 1817, at the age of 20, Frederick succumbed to the wasting disease. It wasn’t uncommon — tuberculosis was the grim reaper of its time, claiming more lives in the 18th and 19th centuries than just about any other illness. Entire families were ravaged by it, and lacking the scientific knowledge we have today, people turned to folklore and desperate measures.

Grave of Frederick Ransom

The family doctor, local physician Dr. Frost tried his best, but there was no cure for the disease yet, and as a result, desperate attempts and alternative cures based on the supernatural grew forth. 

His little brother, Daniel Ransom, wrote this about him: My remembrance of him is quite limited as I was only three years at the time of his death… It has been related to me that there was a tendency in our family to consumption…

Vampirism by Another Name

Vampire panics were a tragically real response to tuberculosis outbreaks, especially in rural New England. The belief was that a deceased family member could, from beyond the grave, drain the life from surviving relatives. The “solution” was grim: exhume the suspected corpse, check for signs of unnatural preservation, and burn the heart or organs to stop the so-called vampire’s deadly influence.

Frederick’s family was no exception. Despite their standing and education, fear trumped reason. After Frederick’s death, his father, desperate to protect the remaining family from the slow death of tuberculosis, had his son’s body exhumed. He was worried that his son would rise from the grave and attack the rest of the family. 

In accordance with folk belief, they removed his heart and burned it in a blacksmith’s forge. It was in Woodstock Village Green and a public place where all could see. It was common that the ashes of the remains would either be inhaled or mixed into a medicine. It isn’t confirmed that this happened to Frederick, although some sources said that his remains were given to his family. He was buried in Ransom-Kendall Cemetery.

Daniel wrote about his father: It seems that Father shared somewhat in the idea of hereditary diseases and withal had some superstition for it was said that if the heart of one of the family who died of consumption was taken out and burned, others would be free from it. And Father, having some faith in the remedy, had the heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried, and in was burned in Captain Pearson’s blacksmith forge. 

A Futile, Tragic Attempt

Unsurprisingly, the ritual didn’t work. Tuberculosis isn’t a vampire’s curse; it’s a contagious bacterial disease. As Frederick’s surviving brother, Daniel Ransom, would later write:

“However, it did not prove a remedy, for mother, sister, and two brothers died afterward.”

In a touch of dark irony, Daniel would go on to note that it had been said the family was predisposed to consumption, and that he, too, would likely die young. But in a final, satisfying twist to this grim tale — Daniel Ransom lived to be over 80 years old. But although he was young, he would never forget the fear and desperation that had his family and community in a tight grip. 

The Legend of Corwin in Woodstock

Another vampire story often seen in connection of the Ransom incident is that of Corwin in Woodstock. The story was retold in 1890 in The Vermont Standard, many years later, and some now believe that this story was actually a retelling and much changed version of Ransom. An old woman told about the case that had happened fifty years earlier and that she had witnessed the burning of his heart herself.

According to the story, a young man with the surname Corwin died of “consumption“, “ and was buried in the Cushing Cemetery in June of 1830 corner of Cloudland Road and River Road. Six month later, the young man’s brother became ill. The newspaper claimed that local physicians, including the respected Dr. Joseph Gallup and Dr. John Powers from the Vermont Medical College, was the ones claiming this had to be the work of a vampire.

The first brother’s body was dug up and examined. His heart, which was found filled with blood, was removed, boiled in a pot, and buried in a hole with a seven-ton block of granite on top. To complete the grisly ritual, the site was then sprinkled with the blood of a young bullock.

Although not verified, it looks eerily similar to the case of Frederick. There was no boy named Corwin in the records who died, but the names of the physicians did actually exist.

Frederick Ransom’s Legacy

Two years later, The Vampyre by John Polidori was published and is considered to have kickstarted the undead and vampires in modern literature. His death and exhumation was not the first, and it would not be the last during the Vampiric Panic that threw New England back to the dark ages. 

His grave lies quietly now in South Woodstock, a reminder of the fragile line between reason and superstition, and how grief can drive even the most educated people to light the funeral pyres of old legends.

So next time you hear a ghost story about New England’s vampire past, remember Frederick Ransom — the Dartmouth scholar whose heart was fed to fire by those who loved him most. Not because they were ignorant, but because they were human.

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References:

Woodstock’s Vampire

Valley News – Among the Undead in Woodstock

Fredrick Ransom (1797-1817) – Find a Grave Memorial

Hunting Vampires in Vermont

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The Mysteries of The Bennington Triangle on Glastenbury Mountain

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People have always feared the wilderness. This is also the case of the area around Glastenbury Mountain where several strange disappearances have made people think that it could be something strange going on in what has been known as The Bennington Triangle. 

Deep within the picturesque landscape of Vermont lies a region cloaked in mystery and shrouded in eerie tales—the Bennington Triangle. An area encompassing the southwestern part of the state, the Bennington Triangle has become synonymous with a series of unexplained disappearances, ghostly encounters, and inexplicable phenomena that have perplexed locals and intrigued paranormal enthusiasts alike. 

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The Bennington Triangle has been compared to the similar Bridgewater Triangle of Bermuda Triangle, a place where strange things happen. The phrase was coined in 1992 by the author Joseph A. Citro, who wrote about this in his books, Shadow Child. Citro has also called the area as a “Yankee Shangri-La”, a place where people go to never be seen again. 

The area is said to be around the Glastenbury Mountain and Long Trail, encompassing towns like Bennington, Woodford and Shaftsbury as well as once thriving logging towns, now abandoned ghost towns of Somerset and Glastenbury. 

It is said that strange disappearances started way back and that from 1920 to 1950, as much as 10 people vanished in these parts. At the heart of the strange things said to go on in the triangle is a series of disappearances from 1945-1950:

The Disappearances of the Bennington Triangle

The unsettling reputation of the Bennington Triangle stems from a series of unexplained disappearances that occurred between 1945 and 1950. Five individuals, including a seasoned hiker, a college student, and a war veteran, vanished without a trace within the confines of Glastenbury Mountain—a prominent feature within the triangle. 

Disappearing People: Circulated photograph of Paula Jean Welden; clipping from missing persons flyers. Her case in particular drew a lot of media attention.

The first incident occurred on November 12, 1945, when 74-year-old Middie Rivers vanished during a hunting trip in the mountains by Long Trail Road. Despite an extensive search, the only evidence discovered was a rifle cartridge in a stream. 

A year later, on December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden, an 18-year-old sophomore at Bennington College, disappeared during a hike on the Long Trail. An elderly couple said they saw her in front of them on the trail. She turned a corner, and when they turned the same, she had vanished. Despite a substantial search effort and FBI involvement, no trace of her was found. Her disappearance got a lot of attention, and it even inspired the Shirley Jackson novell from 1951, Hangsaman.

On December 1, 1949, James E. Tedford, a veteran from the Bennington Soldiers’ Home, vanished mysteriously while on a bus from St. Albans. According to the stories, he vanished into thin air between the last stop and Bennington, leaving all of his belongings in the luggage rack with an open bus timetable on his seat. Skepticism surrounds claims that he “dematerialized” as he wasn’t reported missing until a week later.

In 1950, the mystery continued with the disappearance of 8-year-old Paul Jepson, left unattended near a local highway for an hour as his mother fed some pigs. He was wearing a red jacket at the time and were supposed to be clearly visible in the greenery, but not a trace was found. It is said that just in case, people don’t wear red clothes in the area because of this. 

Lastly, 53-year-old Frieda Langer, who vanished during a hike near Somerset Reservoir. Frieda Langer’s body was found seven months later, three and a half miles from the campsite, with no determined cause of death.

Other than the area they disappeared in and the time period, they found no other connections between the five disappearances.   

The Bennington Monster

So what happened in this time period? Some claim it had to be UFOs, perhaps even Bigfoot himself. Others say that the forests of the area have become haunted and people claim to hear strange noises and voices. 

The place has been known as a place to avoid since colonial time with people encountering strange lights and even monstrous animals in the wilderness. 

The legend of the “Bennington Monster” dates back to the early 1800s when a stagecoach encountered a washed-out road. The stage driver discovered massive footprints in the mud, distinctly larger than human. Suddenly, the coach was assaulted by a colossal creature, toppling the vehicle on its side. Terrified passengers glimpsed only a pair of eyes before the monster emitted a roar and vanished into the forest. Subsequent sightings portrayed the creature as a towering, hairy figure, dark in color, and exceeding six feet in height.

There is also a story about a man named Carol Herrick who in 1943 went missing while hunting. He was found three days later near Glastonbury, crushed to death, surrounded by big footprints.

Native American Legends

There are also early colonists that have retold native american stories and Algonquin legends that called the Glastenbury Mountain a human eating rock. An evil stone on the mountain that would open up and swallow those standing on it. 

Legends tell of ancient Native American curses and supernatural entities that haunt the region and that they wouldn’t step on the land unless to bury the dead. They said that the “four winds” met there in an eternal struggle, which has some truth to it, as the wind on Glastenbury Mountain is prone to sudden shifts, and even the plants grow in weird angles because of this. 

The Vortex of The Bennington Triangle

While the disappearances of the 1940s and 1950s remain unsolved, the Bennington Triangle continues to captivate the imagination of those intrigued by the unknown. What could it be? Some from the native tribes legends? Could it be a monster like Bigfoot roaming the place, or perhaps even a serial killer wandering the mountain?

Ghost hunters, paranormal investigators, and curious seekers venture into the depths of the triangle, searching for clues and attempting to unlock the secrets that have eluded explanation for decades.

Today as well as in the old days, the wilderness of Glastenbury Mountain and the surrounding Bennington Triangle makes us afraid for what could be in the vast and wild area where a person can disappear without a trace. 

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References:

Bennington Triangle, Vermont – Legends of America 

The Haunting of Glastenbury Mountain 

https://eu.southcoasttoday.com/story/lifestyle/1996/11/23/vermont-mountains-haunted-by-disappearances/50617656007/

Bennington Triangle – Wikipedia 

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The Ghost on Emily’s Bridge

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Once a heartbroken girl that didn’t know how to go on to a vengeful ghost. Emily who haunts Emily’s Bridge in Vermont still got claws. 

The Gold Brook Covered Bridge as it is named officially usually goes under the name Stowe Hollow Bridge or simply Emily’s Bridge. 

It is a small and single lane bridge made out of wood in the small town of Stowe in Vermont. It is a covered bridge that you can see around New England especially. 

Emily’s Bridge as it was nicknamed after a local legend was built in 1844 and the old and weathered wood of the bridge holds a heart wrenching ghost story. 

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The Legend of Emily

The Haunted Bridge: Gold Brook, Stowe Hollow or Emily’s Bridge, Stowe, Vermont// Source

According to legend there is a girl named Emily who haunts the bridge since her death in the 1850s. 

She was only a teenager when she died and had a hard life as she was from a poor family. She fell in love with a boy from a richer family who promised to marry her. However, his parents refused and they decided to elope. 

The boy told her to wait for him on that bridge at midnight and she did as she had instructed her.

But when the time went into the late night and early mornings she realized he would never come for her. She had been abandoned and had nowhere to go. In her distress she jumped from the bridge into the small brook that ran under it and died. 

The Voices in the Tunnel

According to locals, they still claim to see her ghost around midnight as she makes an appearance on Emily’s Bridge. There is no real papertrail or tangible evidence of who Emily could be or that she existed at all. 

But even so, the legend preserverce and have perhaps only grown. She is no longer the tragic girl that jumped to her death, but more of a vengeful ghost according to some of the stories. Strange voices are heard in the short tunnel that covers Emily’s Bridge and some have even said the cars have come out scratched by something that looks like claws. 

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References

Emily’s Bridge – Stowe, Vermont – Atlas Obscura

The Ghostly Store Behind Emily’s Covered Bridge| Stowe Country Homes

This Place in History: Emily’s Bridge