My gut does say that like going into a forest near dark makes me think of kind of wanting something bad to happen to yourself.

But you think of a forest after dark as a fun place and I think of it as a scary place.

Yeah. So those are also different perspectives.

Yeah. So those are also different perspectives. Through the halls of the eccentric Bennington College, a small liberal arts school in southwest Vermont, tales of a local curse have been passed around between classmates for 75 years. Known as the Bennington Triangle,

this legend eventually spread all over the country as a way to make sense of a string of mysterious

disappearances that occurred in the Erie Mountains surrounding the quiet college town.

UFOs, forest monsters, strange structures in the woods, each of these paranormal menaces

have been blamed for causing the Bennington

Five to vanish without a trace in the 1940s and early 50s. I'm joined today by Sarah Marshall of

Your Wrong About for the first in a two-part series about the Bennington Triangle, And for part one, I'll tell her the story of the most

famous and confounding of these disappearances that would help inspire one of our favorite

novels of all time, the secret history by Donna Tart, of which there are some tiny spoilers ahead.

So let's go now to the remote campus of Bennington College, a place of genius and madness

and tragedy, surrounded by imposing mountains and their dark, dense forests, where you may go

looking for adventure and then never come back out.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

I am just over the moon for this one, you all.

I am so excited that my dear friend, the literary icon, Sarah Marshall, is here for this very literary episode.

That also is much more true crime than I or we have done in a very long time. So that's what we got going on today.

Sarah, thank you so much for being here. Literary true crime. Are you kidding me? Kelsey.

Don't threaten me with a good time. I'm so happy to be here with you. So before we get into why I

really wanted to do this episode with you, I just want to give just the briefest overview of what we're talking about today, all right?

...