A young woman leaves her college dormitory for a walk.

She is seen heading toward the Long Trail in Vermont.

Then she vanishes into one of America’s strangest landscapes.

In this episode of Haunted UK Podcast, Steve explores the mysterious 1946 disappearance of Paula Jean Welden — a Bennington College student whose final known journey took her toward the wooded trails of southern Vermont, and into a case that remains unsolved more than seventy-five years later.

Paula had been feeling low in the days before she disappeared, and friends believed she wanted to clear her head with a long walk. On 1 December 1946, she changed into jeans, white shoes, and a distinctive red parka, then left campus for the Long Trail. Several witnesses later reported seeing her along the route, including a petrol station owner, a driver who gave her a lift, and campers who warned her that she seemed underprepared for the cold and fading light.

By evening, Paula had not returned. Searches involving students, volunteers, National Guard troops, firefighters, aircraft, dogs, and local authorities found no trace of her. No clothing, no body, no remains, no confirmed personal items — nothing that could explain whether she became lost, ran away, met with foul play, or disappeared through some stranger set of circumstances.

The episode also explores the wider mythology of the Bennington Triangle, where several people vanished over a five-year period, giving rise to theories involving serial killers, wilderness danger, alien abduction, cryptid encounters, occult activity, and other unexplained phenomena. Yet beneath every theory remains the human reality of Paula’s case: a young woman who walked away from college one cold afternoon and was never seen again.

Careful, atmospheric, and unsettling, this episode blends cold case history, missing persons investigation, wilderness mystery, witness testimony, and paranormal speculation into one of the most enduring disappearances linked to the Bennington Triangle.

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