The Girl Who Got Lost in the Woods
Stamford 18-year-old Paula Welden has been lost in the woods since Dec. 1, 1946.
It’s no wonder the Bennington College sophomore caught the attention of author Shirley Jackson. Jackson, best known for the short story “The Lottery” and the gothic/ psychological horror of “The Haunting of Hill House,” would recognize the potential dread of being stranded alone in eternal New England woods as December light and temperatures waned.
In the new film “Shirley,” Elisabeth Moss channels the writer’s prickliness and fragility as she seeks inspiration for a second novel circa 1950. Jackson finds it in a “Missing Person” leaflet posted to a tree at Bennington. A young house guest becomes a stand-in for Welden (Odessa Young portrays both), and they jointly serve as Jackson’s muse for “Hangsaman.” The movie burrows into a writer’s process, offering moments such as Jackson scrawling thoughts while perched on the edge of a clawfoot tub.
The film, like that book, toys with realities and perceptions. But at its root is Welden’s legend, also immortalized in Jackson’s short story “The Missing Girl.”
Seventy-four years after what was once called “Stamford’s greatest mystery,” we’ve never reported the link between Welden’s disappearance and Jackson’s oeuvre in these pages. But then, aside from a flash of the girl’s Brookdale Drive address, Stamford plays no role in the film or the book.
Before her disappearance, every cameo Weldon made in The Stamford Advocate involved her youthful artwork, notably murals with a circus motif she contributed to the Stamford Hospital children’s ward. Her brief life left a lasting artistic footprint in Jackson’s work, while gaps in the investigation into her disappearance prompted the formation of the Vermont State Police the following summer.
The film is largely as fictional as Jackson’s novel. The true story of Paula Welden reads like storytelling as well, with searches through caves, gravel pits and 270 miles of woods. When a Vermont detective finally stopped hunting in 1961, five years after she was legally declared dead, he admitted “I don’t think we ever had a good clue.”
Longtime Advocate columnist Len Massell wrote on the sixth anniversary of Welden’s disappearance that her name “has become synonymous with mystery, not only in Bennington and the East, but throughout the nation.”
That was a year after “Hangsaman” was published (“The Catcher in the Rye,” which also has Stamford roots, also came out in 1951). Yet Welden’s story faded from these pages. Her family moved to Florida. Lacking an ending, the mystery was largely forgotten.
It began after she finished working a Sunday cafeteria shift at the college and decided to take on Vermont’s Long Trail, which was about 6 miles from campus. She hitched at least one ride, chatted with a group coming out of the woods, and vanished.
After her roommate reported her missing, the college shut down so faculty and students could help look for her. Her story shares a common theme with Greenwich’s greatest mystery. Like Martha Moxley’s murder, early missteps compromised the investigation.
Paula’s father, William Archibald Welden, later complained that Vermont followed police procedures of a century earlier. Essentially, 600 people formed a posse.
A grim bounty, raised by family and friends, was offered with a deadline: Information leading to her discovery alive was worth $5,000; or $2,000 if her remains were found.
The Advocate drew attention for hiring a private detective to assist in the search. It wasn’t just a local P.I., but Raymond C. Schindler, who was profiled in The New Yorker in 1943 and was later the subject of a biography, “The Complete Detective,” with a forward by “Perry Mason” author Erle Stanley Gardner. Schindler found nothing.
William Welden had a friend fly over the Glastonbury Mountains.
Nothing.
Working off a tip from a gas station owner, they searched through 500 tons of gravel in a pit. Nothing.
A Vermont clairvoyant prophesied Paula was in Mount Anthony Cave, which bore the legend of swallowing three children 30 years earlier.
Nothing.
When Christmas arrived, her father made a plea over radio station WSTC and in The Stamford Advocate. Paula,
If this broadcast reaches you, know that we love you. Whatever may have prompted you to leave us, if you have gone off of your own free will, be sure we will find a better answer to your problem by working it out together. … Daddy
After the woods thawed in May, efforts finally became more methodical. Sixty members of the National Guard joined local woodsman in using U.S. Army methods to conduct a proper search. Welden joined them. So did Advocate Managing Editor E.R. McCullough. Nothing.
The trolls of the day mailed false leads, sending investigators to Albany, Montreal, Chicago and Alabama. A headless body was found. It turned out to be a man’s.
On June 1, 1947, a woman showed up at the Stamford police station and declared to the desk sergeant that she was Paula Welden. Police Chief John Brennan called McCullough. When the editor arrived, she exclaimed, “That’s my daddy.”
McCullough asked Brennan to call Paula’s father. He arrived, looked at the young woman and said, “It’s just another false alarm.”
The woman was identified and returned to the Hartford mental institution she had left days earlier.
Finally, a summit was held that I cannot fathom occurring today. McCullough gathered her father, Connecticut and Vermont police, the private eye and fellow journalists from Albany and Boston in The Stamford Advocate’s Atlantic Street office. After five hours, they conceded they had nothing to go on.
There were no women in the room. Another flaw in the investigation.
In the film, Paula gets into Jackson’s head. The author wonders about suicide, or a secret pregnancy.
“What happens to all lost girls? They go mad,” she reasons.
The screen Shirley Jackson doesn’t crack the mystery either. But she again summons the darkest horrors that lurk in the imagination. The Girl Who Got Lost in the Woods will never be found, leaving behind a perpetual trail of terrors for those haunted by contemplation of her fate.