The Lore of Bennington College

The mysteries and allure of Donna Tartt’s exclusive college.

Life is sometimes stranger than fiction, and no other university is more shrouded in mystery than Bennington College in Vermont. We often hear the name of this liberal arts college being discussed as the inspiration for Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. A novel about a group of eccentric Classics students with obsessive tendencies and morally ambiguous personalities, to say the least. Donna Tartt herself attended Bennington College in 1982, and while parallels between fiction and reality exist, the mysteries surrounding the institution predate her time there.

The Bennington Triangle

American author Joseph A. Citro, who has dedicated most of his life to researching the folklore and mysteries of Vermont, christened the Glastenbury Mountain area as the Bennington Triangle. Bennington, alongside other towns such as Woodford, Shaftsbury, and Somerset are included in the perimeter. As the name implies, it’s a nod to the famous Bermuda Triangle, due to both locations seeing an abnormal amount of disappearances.

The sinister series of events begins with Middie Rivers disappearing in 1945. He was hiking the Long Trail while on a hunting trip with other seasoned hunters like himself. He was never found. A year later, the disappearance of Paula Welden in 1946 would bring the most attention to the area. At the mere age 18, Paula was a sophomore at Bennington College and had left her accommodation to walk down the Long Trail. A number of faculty members and students saw Paula leave, namely Ernest Whitman who gave her directions as per her request. Strangely, witnesses noted that she wasn’t wearing a jacket. This was particularly unusual given that it was December, and Vermont winters are notoriously harsh. Fans of ‘The Secret History’ will be all too familiar with this, thanks to the vivid passages detailing the narrator's near-hypothermic experiences during his quasi-homeless winter break escapades. If you know, you know.

Unfortunately, even with the FBI involved in the search for Paula Welden, she was never found. From 1946 until 1950, additional disappearances would take place, further shrouding Bennington and Vermont in mysterious theories from serial killers to paranormal forces. An intriguing detail that has caught the attention of those fascinated by these unsolved cases is that most of the vanished individuals were wearing red. This eerie coincidence draws unsettling parallels to the tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

Shirley Jackson and her novel ‘Hangsaman’

he missing case of the Bennington College student inspired the novel ‘Hangsaman’ by Shirley Jackson who was residing in North Bennington at the time of the disappearance. Not only was Jackson a part of the community, her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman worked as a professor teaching classes in language, literature, and the history of myth and ritual. Considering the commotion that the disappearance of Paula Welden created, both on a local and national level, it is likely that Jackson took part in the search parties (Bustle, 2018). Her novel, Hangsaman, is set at a liberal arts college reminiscent of Bennington and with a storyline loosely based on the events that took place. In keeping with her style, Jackson infused the novel with elements of psychological horror and folklore.

Tales of Paula Welden's disappearance lingered in Bennington's culture for nearly four decades, until a young Donna Tartt arrived as a student at the college. It is likely that accounts of the media frenzy, the mysterious force of the forest, and the FBI searches in the depths of Vermont’s winter inspired Tartt’s writing on the aftermath of Bunny’s death. Nonetheless, Donna Tartt and her group of friends have become mysteries in their own right.

Drinking the Kool-Aid of Bennington College

Alumna Sarah Jack recounts her experience at Bennington College after graduating in 2017, reaffirming the enigmatic power the college seems to have on its students. ‘To those who have attended and are currently attending the school, there’s a unified understanding that there’s no where else like it’, she writes. At its core, Bennington College approaches education in a drastically different way to most universities. There are no required classes or a limit to credits. Students are expected to take a variety of subjects, even if they are not fully related to one’s area of interest. The college maintains its reputation for a highly selective and exclusive admissions process.

Interestingly, in the '80s, Bennington did not consider SAT scores in their admissions process. In a 1992 interview to The Bennington Voice, Donna Tartt light-heartedly asks: ‘Tell me something, I heard that Bennington requires SAT scores now, is that true? . . . Because I wouldn’t have been there if they had required them when I applied. I think I got in on a short story I sent in. Nobody I know would have been there if they had required SAT scores. That was part of the reason I went to Bennington. . . . Everybody there was like the oddly gifted person who made bad grades and hung out in the parking lot.’ (Esquire, 2018).

The enigmatic aura of Bennington College from the 1980s continues to captivate fans of the dark academia genre and curious literary enthusiasts seeking glimpses into the lives of Tartt and her contemporaries. This generation has, in many ways, perpetuated the college's mystique. ‘Whispers of what the campus was like in the 80s had trickled down from that time to my own. Tales of seances, satanic cults, ghosts of students who had hung themselves in their dorm rooms, and other intrigue were passed on to myself and other freshman. Upperclassmen trying to scare us, quite a few of the stories held some truth to them. You can still find the remains of a pentagram carved into the floorboards of one of dorms’, are the illustrations we get from Sarah Jack regarding life on campus as a freshman in 2014. This was also around the time The Goldfinch had just won the Pulitzer Prize and everyone at Bennington was excited about it.

First-hand accounts from the 80s still linger in various corners of the internet. Ian Gittler, from the class of ‘84, speaks about meeting Bret Easton Ellis as a student and how he supposedly had a suitcase full of drugs. Paula Powers, from the same class as Tartt and Ellis, mentions Ellis’s popularity and how most of the girls had a crush on him, even before his writing had gained him notoriety. Powers also recounts her time with Tartt: ‘Once, during freshman year, she invited me to a martini hour in her dorm and she was wearing a black brocade skirt-suit and high heels, and smoking from a long, slender cigarette holder—very feminine, very elegant. She was mysterious.’ (Esquire, 2018).

One sometimes wonders what on earth was in the water at Bennington College, particularly when looking at the class of 1986 with talents like Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt. As I write this piece on a foggy autumn day in Oxford, England—far from Vermont and the US—I can sense the college's allure. Though I never attended as a student, and while I may never visit it in my adult life, it will always have a place in my heart as Hampden College.