Missing Teen Last Seen Watching ‘Normal People’ With Parents
THE search for missing Waterford girl Ursula Whelan continues into a second week after the 19-year-old vanished without a trace shortly after watching critically-acclaimed drama Normal People with parents Alice and Derek during ‘one of the ridier bits’.
Speculation in the southeast has been rampant since the teenager’s disappearance and has ranged from the standard ‘she’s away off with some young lad’, to McCann-esque conspiracy theories and even rumours of the occult.
Ursula, described locally as a fun, outgoing girl, had been isolating at home with her parents when they decided to give the new TV drama a go, seemingly unaware of the sexually charged content, including scenes of ‘young ones up to all sorts’.
In their official statement to Gardaí, the Whelan family claims that they were taken by surprise by the graphic nature of the sex scenes which ‘they did not expect on RTÉ’, and that the minute a nipple showed up, all three members of the family clenched their eyes tightly shut until the ‘dirty noises’ stopped.
However, when they opened their eyes again, Ursula had vanished without a trace.
“No doors were opened, no windows, her phone is here – she’d never leave without her phone,” stated a visibly upset Derek Whelan.
“We didn’t hear her get up. All we could hear were those horrible young people going at each other like filthy feral animals” added a distraught Alice Whelan.
Although Gardaí are using the Whelan’s testimony as their official line of enquiry, the very active Waterford conspiracy community has pointed to notorious and historical examples.
“Stop me if this sounds familiar; a young girl with her parents and all of a sudden she disappears and the parents launch an investigation which includes a story from them that doesn’t quite add up?” proposed Sean Gunn, owner of Waterford’s foremost conspiracy podcast, ‘The Smoking Sean’.
Sean’s podcast joins several other True Crime podcasts on the mysterious subject of Ursula Whelan’s disappearance, including one from US occult expert Darren Strange, who claims the vanishing has more than a hint of the supernatural about it.
“First of all, the notion that the embarrassment of watching sex scenes with her parents literally caused this young woman to ‘glitch’ out of our reality and enter an Upside-Down, parallel version of the world we know,” said the host of Darren’s Tales.
“This has a number of precedents within Ireland. Four kids across the country went missing in the 90s after the episode of Glenroe where Miley went at Fidelma in the hay; it’s a phenomenon that we call Mortification-based transference.
Another theory is the God-fearing Whelan family sacrificed their daughter in a bid to return a semblance of order to the house, or to appease God who they believe would have been angered at scenes of an all-Honours student getting the high hard one from a working class corner-forward.”
Meanwhile, Ursula’s college friends are united in their thoughts as to where their pal went.
“She has definitely run away, ” said one, adding “I’ve been watching TV with my parents when sex scenes have come on, and trust me; you never want to look those people in the face ever again. Morto for her”.
Conversely, Waterford grandmother Agnes Houlihan speculated that the teenager became so aroused by the scenes of daytime riding that she fled the county in search of ‘a good hoosh’.
“If you listened to LiveLine the other day you would see that the youth of Ireland are a precious, untouched generation of puritans who are saving themselves for marriage and wouldn’t go near a genital if you paid them. You recklessly throw in this filth on St. Bridget’s channel, in the middle of the day at half nine, and what do you expect?
“You’ll have kids going off like rockets now, spraying potential children everywhere, wasting them. I’d say the poor girl is on one of the back roads outside Waterford, lost, confused, rubbing the gusset off herself. She’ll come home when she realises that sex is a sin, mark my words”.
The search continues.