 I'm really excited about today's topic. I've been looking forward to it, and I have an excellent script to go through, so forgive me if I look down. So today we're going to spend some time on the darker side of history. Our archivists and special guests will tell you tales they've learned from the state's public records around missing persons, murders, fortune tellers, and terrible accidents. And of course, none of these events took place here in this building, and it would be silly to think that ghosts walk these halls unless the records we hold contain so much Vermont history. Isn't it possible that those physical objects carry with them an echo of those lost souls of the past? We'll be showing you some of those physical objects throughout this event if you just watch the screen. And people may think a government archives is a boring place, but we're here today to prove those people wrong. Archival records are a bit like the undead, aren't they? They just keep going. Okay, so our first story for you today is a tale of five mysterious disappearances. Vermont is such a small place. It's hard to believe people can just vanish, but it does happen, and in some areas, more than others. Allow our guest, Brian Lindner, to tell you about the disappearances at Glassenbury. All right, well, so I'm gonna speak for a few minutes about the Bennington Triangle because there are so many victims. There's so many disappearances and so many open cases after 70 years. Only one of these was ever mostly solved, and they all are right around Glassenbury Mountain. Sometimes this is called the Bennington Triangle, sometimes Glassenbury. There's a lot about it this on the internet, but when you read the stuff on the internet, be careful, they make it spookier than it really is. So this is the number of people that I've determined disappeared in the Bennington Triangle, and this is over a five-year period, 1945 to 1950, and we're just gonna talk about two or three, I think three of these specific individuals. But there's clearly a sense of spookiness in this whole thing with five people disappearing in the same location, not to be solved, even after 70 years. Even back in 1950, the Bennington Banner was talking about, was this another dimension? Was there a lost horizon? What happened to these people? Did spaceships suck them up and take them off Earth? The first case is Middie Rivers. He was 74 years old, and it was deer season, and he was out hunting on Woodford Mountain, where the circle is there, and about one o'clock in the afternoon, he bumped into his son-in-law out in the woods. They had a little conversation, they agreed, yeah, one o'clock we'll meet back at camp and have a sandwich and call it a day. And Middie Rivers never showed up and has never been seen again. And the only evidence ever found is they found one single bullet or cartridge next to a stream bed they thought might have come from his rifle. Now, who searched for Middie Rivers in 1945? This is a whole story in itself. This is before the Vermont State Police, so how did you search for people? Well, you threw masses of people at it, hundreds of people. You sent them all into the woods in lines looking for these missing individuals. So this gives you an idea of who was searching for Middie Rivers. You take the fire department out of service, you send them into the woods, the Boy Scouts, three companies in Bennington gave everybody the day off to go looking, the Civil Air Patrol, high school students, 90 soldiers from the regular U.S. Army from Fort Devens were sent up here to Vermont to look for Middie Rivers. The Vermont State Guard was called out. And if you're not familiar with the State Guard, that is a well-regulated militia that took the place of the National Guard during World War II because they were off fighting in the 43rd Division. At one point, they were trying to get so many people, they were targeting for 1,000 searchers. They didn't get them, so they said they'd pay them $4 a day if anybody that showed up. And $4 a day in 1945 was a lot of money. Nobody showed up to claim $4. They ended up after searching for eight days, 500 searchers and never found Middie Rivers. And he is still missing today. This is probably the most famous case from that location. And this is on the opposite side of the road from where Middie Rivers disappeared. This is the long trail entrance in Woodford. Paula Weldon was 18. She was a student at Bennington College. She told her roommate she was gonna go for a short hike on the long trail and walked out of their dorm room and disappeared, never to be seen again. And this was on December 1st, 1946. Again, the state police does not exist. So who does the searching for her? Well, it was the local sheriff, Clyde Peck. He had almost no search and rescue experience, although he had headed up the successful search in 1937 for five-year-old Alice Baker who disappeared on Bald Mountain down there for five days and she survived uninjured. But he had no search and rescue assets and Paula Weldon's dad gets really upset. He's an engineer. He likes to do things scientifically and he thinks the search is being bungled from square at number one, so he steps in and he becomes the investigator and he quickly determines there could be criminal activity here. Maybe she didn't just disappear out on a hike. And Mr. Weldon kept telling them you need search and rescue assets. You need bloodhounds. You need people that know how to do searches and nothing was happening. So he really, truly takes over and he makes it known that this whole thing is being bumbled. His daughter is missing. Nobody's effectively looking for her. And needless to say, state and local officials are clearly embarrassed by his actions and his statements. He's to the point where he's following up on reports of sightings. He's going interviewing people. The reward gets up to $4,000. This is a picture of him out on the long trail when people found what appeared to be female sneaker prints in the snow and he tried following them. So he's really driving this thing. To the point where the state finally said, okay, we've got to have somebody and the criminal side look at this and they called in the most famous detective in Vermont history you've never heard of, Almo Franzoni. Almo Franzoni investigated every major case in Vermont from the 30s, 40s, 50s and up until the very early 60s. He was a very famous detective in Vermont in all the famous cases. And it's announced the state detective, Almo Franzoni is called in. He determines, yeah, there's probably some criminal activity here. Bell Helicopters donates a helicopter to come over. Who do they send up in it? It's kind of spooky. They don't send up a searcher. They send up the newspaper reporters to go fly around overhead. Several times they find footprints but nobody can follow them. Even in the snow and in the mud because no one's been trained on how to actually follow footprints. And it was the same thing that happened at the Middie Rivers case. It's gonna happen again at the Frida Langer case. One point they excavated entire gravel pit down in Bennington because they thought maybe her tracks led into the gravel pit and maybe she was buried in a landslide. Finally, they call a news conference in the state's attorney's living room. Franzoni, the detective says, well, I haven't got enough criminal activity to keep me going. And Mr. Weldon just unloads in front of the media about how inadequate and inefficient everybody in Vermont is. And the next day, you've got all kinds of experts up here from the Connecticut State Police, the Massachusetts State Police, and they start uncovering a lot more clues because they're going at it scientifically. This is still an open active case. Paula Weldon's case is actively open here at the Vermont State Police. And her legacy is there had been decade after decade after decade trying to form the Vermont State Police and it was successfully lobbied against at every stage until this case when legislature finally said, okay, we need to form the Vermont State Police. And that is why to this day, they are responsible for searches for lost persons. Paul Jepsen, eight years old, goes to the local landfill with his mom and she said, you stay here in the truck, I'm gonna go over, I just have to move the pigs from that pen to this pen. She does it and comes back to the truck. He has gone and he has never been found since. Completely vanished. The only hint was a bloodhound from the Hampshire tracked his tracks to a location where a previous bloodhound had tracked Paula Weldon's when then they both ended at that point. Okay, this is a Frida Langer, 53, she vanishes. So she and her cousin are gonna hike from their summer camp at the Somerset Reservoir and just go for a short hike. They're 150 yards away from camp. She falls into a brook, gets soaking wet, stands up and said, well, I'm gonna go back to camp because I can't hike like this and she vanishes. Now she's very familiar with the area because that's where her summer camp is and she's only 150 yards away from it. Now, the papers made a big deal out of the fact how she had suffered from seizures and they made all these speculative articles about what happened to her because of seizures. Well, it turns out she was having seizures before this. She had brain surgery, successful brain surgery and they put a steel plate back in her head afterwards. But the media made a huge deal about that's why she disappeared. So who searched for Frida Langer? Now you've got the Vermont State Police. They're three years old so you've got all kinds of troopers there. They call in Game Wardens, Rangers. The aeronautics commission is involved. New Hampshire brings over their bloodhounds, Coast Guard, Air Force, Massachusetts Army National Guard sends up a whole contingent. They set up camps, private pilots. You got 300 searches and again, they're doing line searches and they don't find Frida Langer. The next year, almost exactly six months later, two fishermen are at an outlet from Somerset Dam when they stumbled across her body in a brook several miles from where she disappeared. And she was ID'd by the metal plate in her skull. And the interesting thing is the state's attorney, Edward John, shows up on scene and looks at it and says, oh, accidental drowning case closed and turned the body over to the family. They carry her body out of the woods, put it in her head for Massachusetts at North Adams for the funeral but the Vermont state attorney and mom and parents say, wait a minute, get her body back here. We need to autopsy that. So they get the body back from the funeral, take it from the middle of the funeral, send it back to Vermont. And apparently there was an autopsy but I can't tell for sure yet because there is no death certificate. None of these people have death certificates on file in Vermont. So maybe some of these cases will be solved but I tend to doubt it because nobody has files on them except Paula Wellden. All the other files have long ago vanished and there's no death certificates so we're left pretty much with newspaper clippings at this point. And that is the Glastonbury slash Bennington Triangle. Thank you. No haunted history event is complete without a tale of murder. They say all's fair in love and war but archivist Sally Blanchard O'Brien might disagree as she describes a love gone awry in her tale, the murder of Miss May Labelle. After it happened, the doctors told me I would never get any better and that I hadn't long to live. The witnesses made their statements and now it's time to make my own. My name is May Labelle. I'm only 18 years old and Arthur Bosworth shot me four times. The last two times he was as close to me as they are. Quick to temper and believing that the world was out to get him, he fled his home in England after allegedly stabbing his wife. He claimed he walked all the way from Montreal to Essex Junction, which is where I met him. We worked together in 1911 at Johnson's Hotel right by the train station, right across the street from the house where my parents and I lived. He was a quarter and I worked in the kitchen. Right from the start it seemed like he liked me all the witness statements say but you know what? I just simply didn't return his feelings and he just got angrier and more jealous of me. At some point I had to complain to hotel management about him and he assumed that was why he got fired because he did get fired only a few weeks after he'd begun working there and just a couple days before he shot me. Would you believe that he made threats to at least seven different people before he did it and not one of them did anything about it? Of course they remembered the strange comments when they made their witness statements. To one witness he said about me. That's the bitch that did me the dirty work and damn her. I'm going to get even with her even if I kill her. On June 7th, 1911, Arthur spent the morning eating in the train station restaurant drunk and crying to one of the witnesses about his mother. He even showed his revolver to a couple of people. I may go away but I will come back and make trouble for some people. I saw Arthur crossing the street to the station that morning and I said to my father that I didn't like to go to the station because Arthur was mad at me and I feared that he would say something mean to me. But even my own father didn't take my fear seriously thinking that nothing could happen to me in broad daylight and a quiet and law abiding community. But look at me now. Little did we know that morning was the last time that we'd be together in our home. I left for work at the hotel then walking through the station depot like I always did but Arthur was there waiting for me. He jumped upon me and shot and I ran past the station agents window. Arthur followed me out to the platform and I fell to my knees. He shot me two more times as he stood above me point blank in my breast and under my chin. The station agent came out and got the gun away from him though Arthur tried to shoot him too but his gun was empty. The agent was lucky but I lay on the ground four bullets in my body. People lifted me to a bench on the platform and tried to cut away my dress to make me more comfortable but I was too saturated with blood. Mr. Johnson, the hotel owner took me in his car to Fannie Allen Hospital where I lay with my poor mother and father. I made this statement to the authorities the next morning but on June 9th, two days after Arthur shot me I passed away. Arthur's defense was insanity, literally. He was sent to the Vermont State Hospital for observation before his trial. Shortly after the hospital was locked down under quarantine due to an outbreak of diphtheria so the trial had to be postponed. Newspapers say that hospital attendants testified at his trial that Arthur believed the quarantine was a scheme to prevent him from having a hearing. He was ultimately discharged from the hospital in November because he was found not insane. And then the trial began. It was quick and it was eventful. Arthur caused a scene shouting incoherently. One witness fainted on the stand and then the state hospital superintendent took the stand. The doctor testified that Arthur might be inferior mentally to the average man but there wasn't the slightest evidence to show that he was insane when he shot me. The prosecution argued that Arthur knew what he was doing and that it was premeditated. They called it a foul and brutal murder committed by an abandoned and malignant heart punishable by the death penalty. And so it would be. On November 24th, 1911, Arthur Bosworth was found guilty of murder in the first degree with capital punishment. Of course, there were many tries to save Arthur's life. His case went to the Supreme Court. His attorney argued that the jury had been chosen illegally but the verdict was upheld and Arthur got his sentence in May of 1912 to be committed to the state prison at Windsor, confined to hard labor and then kept in solitary confinement until a day in January when he would be hung by the neck until dead. He heard his fate coolly and remarked, it's tough luck. They tried again to save him. A bill came up in the Vermont House of Representatives to commute Arthur's sentence which was required by law at the time. Even Arthur's own mother begged the governor saying that he had taken to intoxicating liquors which made him not responsible for the crime but none of it mattered. Arthur Bosworth was guilty of murdering me and time had run out for him. According to the newspapers, Arthur was nervous leading up to his execution but came to accept his fate. They reported that he remained cool until the end. At one in the afternoon on January 2nd, 1914, Arthur was taken from the state prison and out to the gallows. His spiritual advisor gave a short service and Arthur was asked if he had any last words. Reportedly he said, no, I don't. The trap had six buttons and six deputy sheriffs to push each one. Only one button opened the trap but no one knew which so that none of them had to take the burden of being the executioner. The trap opened at 127 and 15 minutes later, Arthur Bosworth was pronounced dead. He was the last person executed by hanging in Vermont. When he was in prison, the law had been changed and the electric chair was used for execution thereafter but Arthur had been sentenced before so he hung by the neck until he was dead. But there's one more thing. You may say it's only a strange coincidence but Johnson's Hotel, the very place I met my murderer burned to the ground in November of 1912, a year after Arthur's trial. It started in the kitchen where I used to work. The fire could have been put out but there was not enough water pressure and no one quite knew why and suddenly snow started to fall preventing any other buildings from catching on fire. Only the hotel where Arthur and I faithfully met was destroyed. Arthur's body lies in the Department of Corrections plot at the Eskutney Cemetery in Windsor. They buried me in the Holy Family Cemetery in Essex Junction. On my headstone, there was only a name, May Labelle, but now you know the story behind that name. Archivist, Marisa Dobrik will tell us about the terrible West Hartford Bridge disaster using the words from someone who survived it. This is the account of Mrs. Adelaide Brighton. That's B-R-Y-D-E-N. The night of February 5th, 1887 was bitterly cold. The Central Vermont Railroad's Boston Montreal Night Express was an hour and 20 minutes late leaving White River Junction at 2.10 in the morning. There were 115 of us on board. Only 10 minutes after departing, when we reached the West Hartford Bridge, one sleeper car jumped the track and plunged 43 feet to the ice below. Taking with it three more cars before the ties broke, leaving only the remaining cars in front on the bridge. Our train was heated by cast iron and the stoves used coal and the wooden cars were lit with whale kerosene. A fire started immediately. Passengers tried to escape, but many were pinned by the wreckage and even if they were uninjured, the fire engulfed them. The accident killed 37 people and injured another 50. I was one of the injured. I left Boston by train and by half past nine, I was asleep. Before I turned in, I endeavored to have my birth changed to be near a washroom, you understand. Had I succeeded, I would not be here. I don't remember anything until I was awakened by a strange motion of the car. Being much accustomed to travel, I knew at once that we were off the track. I attempted to lift the curtain, but at that moment, the car plunged and instantly I felt myself enclosed by my bedclothes and I know not what else. In seconds, I realized the train had fallen from some height. How I passed those few seconds, I will never know. They seemed eternal. I could not struggle. I knew I needed my strength. Soon, I felt things being pulled away and I knew help had come. Presently, the room was cut through and I tried to climb out. I couldn't free my body from the weight upon it, so I wore only a nightdress in stockings, but they seemed firmly held. I asked for a knife. It was given to me. I cut my nightdress off and was hauled through the hole. I could not stand up. My back was numb from the injury. The men laid me on ice and it covered me with a blanket. There, I witnessed the most horrifying scene of my life. The train could scarcely be recognized. It was already on fire. Each car was set on fire by its own stove and the flames weeping soon set the bridge correctly. The sparks flew madly in the sky, cinder spell on frozen creek like rain. And as the cinder spell to keep you greater, so the men pulled me away just by the blanket. From the cars I could hear the most terrible cries, you're seeing the very soul. One voice still rings in my ears. It was that of a woman. She said, won't someone let me out? So the groans of the dine, the fatal ether, those pinion in the wreck, the roaring flames leaving it devoured the air. You asked, did no help come? Well, one four-old man was there, surprising me quickly. He would have done all he could, but he could get little assistance. The fire houses were distant. The men who had escaped were doing their best, but everyone lost their heads. There was no time. In five minutes, the cars were burned down and nothing but smoldering cinders lay on the bank and the creek. There was such confusion, it was hard to tell what took place in those awful moments. How strange it all seems. Think of this, there I was in a hole. I had dug it in the snow and I had blanket and the temperature was below zero. I was helpless. I couldn't sit up. The pain had gone into my back. Eventually they removed us to a farmhouse and I shall never forget that room with the portraits of President Garfield and Lincoln. They laid us on the floor, many women. The side view was a man with his head torn open. Another, a girl with her face cut. You know, poor Frank Wesson died on the floor of that farmhouse. I didn't see Miss Love will escape. She had done nothing but her chemist. You see, women's clothing gets hot. To escape, one must take off everything. I was rescued with all my clothing torn for me and this, the terrible, terrible struggle for my life. Feel the spirit turn near us today with our last storyteller, Deputy Secretary Winters. He will tell us all about the legendary move. I'm gonna pronounce this wrong. Luvia lafira, lafiria, a medium of local renown and you will, and you know what they say, never play cards with a mind reader. You don't stand a ghost of a chance. Vermont mediums and fortune tellers have long had a strong impact on the state of Vermont. The spiritualist movement swept the nation throughout the 19th century and Vermont was very much a part of this trend. One of our earliest known spiritualists, Asha Sprague, believed a spiritual encounter at age 27 cured her arthritis. She took her message of spirit healing on the road, lecturing on the topic throughout the northeast and the Midwest. Like many spiritualists, Asha was involved in many social reform movements. We can even find her signature on an 1858 petition seeking equal rights for women. A petition still held here at the Vermont State Archives. Other Vermont mediums made their mark in the state and well beyond it. The Eddie family of mediums and their very famous spirit cabinet and their abilities to make objects levitate and contact those from beyond the grave became so famous that their hometown of Chittenden, Vermont was referred to as the spirit veil back in 1874. Multiple spiritualists, societies and associations appear in the archival records of Vermont corporations. Government touches all kinds of people in all aspects of life, mediums and fortune tellers among them. But today I wanna tell you about a personal favorite and widely loved fortune teller from Vermont's past. The skeptics among you may not believe in psychic powers, but the records in our very own Vermont State Archives may give even the most ardent non-believers and skeptics cause to reconsider. Mrs. George Laferria, by all appearances was a classic Vermont farmer's wife. Born Livia Irene Page in Plainfield in 1902, the daughter of the local blacksmith, she married a Quebecois farmer in 1921 and raised five children on her family farm in Plainfield just a few miles down the road from here. Her 1977 death certificate lists her occupation as simply housewife and the gravestone she shares with her husband in the Plainmont Cemetery in East Montpelier simply states her birth and death dates. There's no mention in the vital records or carved into stone of her tremendous extra sensory perception. Public records do provide us with some evidence. She was licensed as a clairvoyant with the State of Vermont. That's right, the State of Vermont was once in the business of licensing fortune tellers. Act 34 of 1937 prohibited the practice of fortune telling in Vermont without a license. Fortune telling in the law was defined broadly as clairvoyance, mind reading, palmistry, horoscope reading or any similar or related occupation. License holders were required to pay an annual tax of five dollars. That was a lot in 1937. There was no test to take and no proof of ability required but Livia's story gives us a glimpse of what life was like for the licensed fortune teller in Vermont. As a young woman of 18 years old, Livia started advertising in the very daily times. The ad read, fortunes told, my clairvoyance can aid you in deciding what to do about matters of love or business. I sincerely wish to help you. More ads in 1920 and 1922 offer, let my clairvoyance aid you in friendship or business meet me personally. Over time, she increasingly used her formidable gift to help people find stray belongings and livestock and even to find people. Livia described her talent this way. The ability is a natural gift so that I have no need for props. I get impressions which are very much like a memory or dream. I see pictures and I hear sounds. It's like remembering how a friend whom you haven't seen for a very long time looks or sounds. You don't really see or hear him. You just get an impression. And if you visited Livia on the farm in Plainfield for help in finding something or for a reading, she might read your palms. She might consult tea leaves. She could also get her strong impressions over the phone making it possible for her to help people at some distance. By the time she was immortalized in a Vermont life feature in 1962, she was known throughout central Vermont having helped hundreds of people find lost objects and most dramatically lost children. Early in her career, she was wakened at 4 a.m. by worried parents from Walden. Livia told the story many years later in her soft, wilting voice. It was a little past sugaring season, I remember. George got up and lit the fire and I talked to these people. Their little boy two or three years old had wandered off and he couldn't be found. It was a long, hard trip from Walden in those days, but in desperation, they had come to see me. We sat in the kitchen and they told me about the child, about searching for him most of the night. Then I pointed a westerly direction from my home. I don't know what direction it was from their home. I just said the boy was in that direction and he's a great deal farther than you might expect him to be. I said he was sheltered in some way and he wasn't cold, but I didn't know how that was possible. I said they'd find him by going far enough in that direction and that he wouldn't be sick after his ordeal. The parents found the boy in the direction I pointed in an old sugar house about two miles crosslots from their home and he never even caught a cold. The state police would consult with her too and sometimes she led them to dead bodies. Former state trooper Ted Hillsup recounted a missing person case of a man who lived near the railroad tracks outside of town. Livia told the officers to walk along the tracks until they found an object that had belonged to the missing man and then they should search the nearby area. They'd find him near something like a big round reel. The officers walked until they found a match book lying between the rails and leaving the rail bed for the surrounding fields. They found his lifeless body near a large spool that had once been held, that had once been used for holding steel cable. Sometimes she even beat police to the body as in a case from Cabot. There was the report of a teenage boy who in 1956 had fallen while walking in the woods and had fatally shot himself for the loaded rifle he carried. That night James Wellman's distraught parents called the police when he failed to return home for supper. The police said they could do nothing until they had light of day. But then they called Livia, who guided them to her son's remains that very evening. Livia was fond of saying that all of her children had this gift to some degree. And you might wonder, has that gift passed on to her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren? Personally, I don't think it has or at least not yet. And I should know for I'm Livia's great-grandson and I also happen to be the deputy secretary of the state. Thank you.