There are several places all over the world where there are known to be vanishings of
all types happening in, near, and around the area itself.
Most of the time we haven’t yet figured out exactly what’s going on or where the
people and possibly even planes or other objects themselves have disappeared to.
They are complete and total mysteries yet they fascinate us because of the fact that
a simple place, perhaps even a place you travel through often without even thinking about
it, seems to have the uncanny quality of erasing people right off the face of the earth and
vanishing either a single person or whole groups of them without a trace left behind.
The Bennington Triangle, The Bermuda Triangle, Lake Anjikuni, The Superstition Mountains,
the Devil’s Sea in Japan and so many others just like them where it’s so incredibly
mysterious and intriguing that the fact you could disappear in the blink of an eye and
end up who knows where and for who knows how long- most likely forever- isn’t much of a deterrent.
Meaning, people who are very much aware of the vanishings and other legends of the areas
in question still travel there all the time and often, without even giving it much thought.
One such place is in Ireland.
This case is just a tiny bit different in that it’s women who are vanishing and within
only a span of several years, many of them went missing without a trace and were never
seen or heard from again.
The disappearances all happened under extremely strange circumstances and left almost no clues
behind between all of the cases so far.
Let’s go to the Emerald Isle now and see what it is that’s really happening over
there in Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle.
Between 1993 and 1998 the small country of Ireland was gripped with fear due to a series
of high-profile disappearances all happening within an 80-mile radius of its capital, Dublin.
The very first disappearance in this series was that of a 26-year-old student from Long
Island, New York named Annie McCarrick.
Annie was attending college and living in Ireland at the time.
On March 26th, 1993 Annie left her apartment in Dublin to run some errands there in town.
CCTV footage showed that she had gone to the grocery store and the bank and then took a
public bus from nearby Ranalegh to a place she loved and visited very often, the town of Enniskerry.
She boarded the bus at approximately 3:40 pm.
As far as confirmed sightings go, this is the last known place she was seen but there
was a lot of talk about what she had done that night and many people claim to have seen
her later on that night as well.
According to some of the reports that later came in, Annie arrived at a nightclub called
Johnny Fox’s Pub at around 9 pm.
Located in the village of Glencullen in the rural Dublin Mountains, Johnny Fox’s was
a popular night spot for college-aged young people and that night it’s said Annie had
gone there to see a show that featured Irish dancing.
Witnesses came forward and said that Annie was seen arriving with and spending time with
a man in a wax jacket who not only paid for her cover to enter the bar but also who was
buying her all of her drinks that night.
Aside from allegedly seeing them enter and order some rounds of drinks, no one came forward
having seen them leave or,for that matter, having seen either one of them ever again.
The next day Annie didn’t show up as planned to pick up her paycheck from work and she
also hadn’t attended a dinner party she had been excited to go to and had agreed to attend weeks earlier.
She was immediately reported as missing and just as quickly one of the most large-scale
and intensive searches for a missing person in the history of the country ensued.
The sketches of the man Annie was reportedly last seen with were very widely distributed
and ground searches all over the area and surrounding mountains commenced but all to no avail.
No new information came in and no new leads were there for authorities to follow.
Because she was last officially seen getting on the bus but was last reportedly seen at
the nightclub the investigation was confusing, to say the least.
Despite the many witnesses who swore they saw Annie at Johnny Fox’s from 9-11 pm on
the night of the 26th the authorities are skeptical.
In order for her to have been there at all, with the last official sighting being on the
bus to Enniskerry, she would have had to have walked 6km, a little over 3 miles, to the
nightclub on a cold and rainy night.
After all, had she taken any sort of public transit or transportation she would have been spotted on video.
There is some doubt though as to whether or not the young woman ever reached her destination in Enniskerry at all.
So, what happened to Annie McCarrick, and where had she actually gone missing from?
Were the sightings at the nightclub really her or were there some confused witnesses,
possibly aided by the influence of alcohol or other narcotics, who had only thought they
had seen her there that night?
These are questions that still haven’t been answered and before the shock of her case
even had time to wear off, there would be more strange disappearances with seemingly
unanswerable questions to come.
On Sunday, July 25, 1993, 39-year-old Eva Brennan left her parent’s home in Rathdown
Park, Rathdown in the foothills of the Dublin mountains, and headed back to her own apartment
but never made it there.
Though it didn’t take long for her family to notice she was missing and report her as
such, they claim the police didn’t do as much for her case as they did for a higher
profile case that happened a few months earlier- the disappearance of Annie McCarrick.
However, a few months later the case did finally gain some traction with Eva’s sister, Colette
McCann saying of it all, “Finally, they decided they were going to take fingerprints. It was months later.
We had cleaned up; there wouldn't have been any left.
Somebody could have visited her.
She was not the type of person that would go out at night.
She was careful.
Something happened.
Eva disappeared three months after Annie McCarrick...
but there was a complete world of difference between the reaction to the disappearance
of the American policeman's daughter and Eva’s.
It should not be the case that certain missing people have a priority over others.
Eva was months missing before they came down.
It is so frustrating.”
The disappearances in this area would continue when on January 3, 1994 22-year-old Imelda
Keenan vanished seemingly into the cold night air where she was last seen walking along
Lomarard Street in County Waterford.
No information aside from where she was last seen ever came in in her case and in November
of 1995 21-year-old Josephine Dollard was the next one to go missing and leave nothing
behind as to her whereabouts.
Josephine was last seen hitchhiking from Dublin to Kilkenny.
One witness came forward in this case but it was only to report that they had allegedly
spotted Josephine using a payphone but there was no immediate confirmation that it was
her and if she had used the payphone it seemed as though after she hung it up she simply
evaporated into the ether and was never seen or heard from again.
A while later one of Joesphine’s friends came forward and admitted to having received
a call from Josephine from what turned out to be that exact payphone but according to
the friend, the call was extremely short with Josephine simply saying hello and then mentioning
an approaching car before hanging up.
In 1996 a 21-year-old hairdresser and model named Fiona Pender, who was also 7 months
pregnant at the time, was last seen standing outside of her apartment in Tullamore, County Offaly.
On February 13, 1997, 17-year-old Ciara Breen went missing from her home in Bachelor’s Walk in Dublin
Ciara and her mother had gone out to a local cafe that night and afterward went home together.
According to her mother, the two watched some television until around half past midnight
and then they both went to bed.
She said that when she woke to go to the bathroom at around 1:50 that same morning, she noticed
Ciara wasn’t in her bedroom.
All of the young woman’s belongings were left behind and her mother was adamant her
daughter would never have simply run off, not for any reason and she had never just
snuck out of the house before not even to return later on.
She reported Ciara as missing but the young woman was never seen or heard from again.
Once again no clues or investigative leads were uncovered and the case went cold almost
as quickly as it had been launched.
A year later a similarly strange disappearance would happen when an 18-year-old student teacher
named Deidre Jacob would vanish under equally baffling circumstances when she basically,
or seemingly at least, seemed to just not exist anymore.
Deidre was a bit different in that she was last seen, by several witnesses in the form
of passing motorists, while walking and running errands on a road she had walked on thousands
of times before in an area she had grown up in and knew well.
As she walked to her parent’s house that day, it was broad daylight, and her neighbors,
many of them, reported last having seen her within just 200 yards of the home.
However, quite bizarrely, Deidre never made it inside and was never seen or heard from again.
Not only did she never open the front door and walk inside as expected but for as many
people who saw her walking around and entering into the area where her parent’s house was
and where she was expected to end up, not a single person ever came forward to report
having seen her leaving that area.
Not a single motorist passed her on the roads that led away from the home and not a single
neighbor had seen her walking anywhere but towards her parent’s front door.
There was nothing out of the ordinary heard at the time either.
It’s as though she were there one moment and gone the very next.
A researcher who specializes in missing person cases and who spent a lot of time investigating
this case in particular, a journalist named Geraldine Niland said of Deidre’s case,
“Neighbors saw her about 200 yards from her home.
And then, suddenly, she was gone.
She literally was standing at the side of the road, about to cross over into her home,
and then, she was gone.”
The same year Deidre Jacob went missing, a 19-year-old young woman named Fiona Sinnott
was last seen leaving a pub in Broadway, County Wexford, in public and full view of several
witnesses, with her boyfriend.
According to his claims, everything was perfectly normal that night but the next day Fiona went
off for a doctor’s appointment and then no one ever heard from her or saw her again.
Of course, there were searches and a full-blown investigation. Despite rumors of murder and speculation about her boyfriend,
no clues or evidence to either of these claims ever turned up.
And this case is another one of the unsolved and strange
disappearances in this particular area of Ireland.
What makes this all so strange and what makes it stand out so vividly is the fact that all
of these cases happened over a very short time span and in a very generalized area.
This caught the attention of the media who then dubbed the area
“The Vanishing Triangle."
The Vanishing Triangle is loosely made up of the area that stretches from the south
in Wexford to the north near Louth and even to the west, in County Offaly.
There were some commonalities throughout all of the above-mentioned cases which, as you
can imagine, made it all the more bizarre and even a bit creepy.
Every single one of the victims disappeared within a very specific geographical range,
all at the eastern borders of Leinster and all were between the ages of late teens to
early forties but were described as young looking for their age.
In every single case, the only thing suspicious about the victims were the circumstances from
which they seemed to have vanished.
They were all spotted being there one moment and gone the very next- disappearing in the blink of an eye.
No evidence at all was ever found left behind and there were never any arrests made in any of the cases either.
A private investigator familiar with all the so-called Vanishing Triangle cases had this
to say about all of it, “You have the same profile, young, attractive females, who have
all disappeared inside a very close geographical triangle.
The common denominator is there’s no evidence left behind, there’s no evidence at all.
No shoes, no belt, no purse, no watch, nothing.”
When discussing only the area where all of this was happening itself, it seems as though
it isn’t a stranger to high strangeness and mysterious deaths had long been being
ascribed to it before any of these cases had occurred.
For instance, in July of 1987, there was the case of Antoinette Smith.
Antoinette was a 27-year-old mother of two who was randomly and mysteriously found deceased
at Kilakee, in the foothills of the Dublin mountains.
In those same mountains in 1992 a woman named Patricia Dougherty, 24 who had last been seen
and known to be out shopping and running errands ended up being found dead as well.
There are more than a few unidentified and unidentifiable skeletal remains that have
been found in these mountains and at the foothills of them too.
The Irish police, also called the garda, have long been suspicious that there were and still
are, perhaps, one or more serial killers operating in and around that area.
In 1998, right after the disappearance of Fiona Sinnott, the garda set up a special
task force called Operation Trace in a full-blown effort to try and track down any evidence,
leads, or new clues and witnesses to any of the cases either about the bodies found or
the disappearances themselves.
The conclusions they drew are interesting, to say the least, although none of it ever
actually brought them any closer to solving any of the cases and leave us only with more
speculation and innuendo to sort through.
The police concluded that the cases of Annie McCarrick, Josephine Dollard, and Deidre Jacob
were all linked, somehow, all three women, and possibly many, if not all of the others, had been murdered.
They actively pursued leads and investigated any and all clues they could grab hold of
and even interviewed witnesses and suspects but they never once found anything that would
get them any closer to finding actual answers.
No one was ever arrested and no new information was ever gleaned into any of the cases.
There are theories and rumors, lots of speculation too, that the Irish authorities had perhaps,
knowingly or accidentally, mishandled the cases from the very beginning.
Despite there being at least three reasonable suspects in these cases and for this task force,
there was never enough evidence to charge anyone with any part of it.
Even in recent years, another man was considered a likely suspect but because there wasn’t
enough evidence we aren’t going to get into any real detail here on any of the alleged or presumed suspects.
What we are left with are a series of tragedies impossible to understand or solve with the current information available.
What do you guys think about Ireland's strange Vanishing triangle?
Be sure to let us know in the comments down below!
But given the nature of our content, please keep it friendly and respectful!
I'm your host Bob and I'll see you in our next video!