The Derry Prequel Just Uncovered a Figure from Stephen King's It That's Been Hiding in Plain Sight the Whole Time

The latest installment of It: Welcome to Derry is loaded with new information, offering the most vivid glimpse yet at Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise. However, with so much baked into one episode, a subtle reveal might have been overlooked completely, and it's a point that needs to be discussed.

After Leroy Hanlon uncovers that Derry is essentially a supernatural containment for an eldritch monster, he promptly gets his family out of town to the air force base on the outskirts. It is also revealed that Stephen Rider's character bus to the state penitentiary was ambushed. Later, we see him in the back of Madeleine Stowe's character car. Initially, it looks like he's seized control as a means of getting out of town. However, once in the woods, the two share an intimate kiss.

Hank asserts the bus was attacked (presumably by Pennywise), allowing him to escape. He then requests Ingrid to locate a person who can help him prove he was framed for the murders at the movie theater.

At the end of the episode, Ingrid makes contact to meet with Leroy's mother, who is already intrigued in Hank’s case. It is at this moment that Ingrid looks directly into the camera and reveals her full name.

“Mrs. Hanlon, my name is Kersh, Ingrid. You don’t know me, but we have a shared acquaintance,” she says.

If that surname is recognizable, it’s because a character named Mrs. Kersh appears in the It novel, as well as both the It miniseries and It: Chapter 2 film. She’s the elderly lady that one of the Losers' Club mistakenly visits, who is later revealed as one of Pennywise’s many forms. However, Welcome to Derry implies that the character was a real person, not just a illusion created by It. Whether Ingrid is the offspring of this character or the same person is not yet verified, but it's entirely possible that Ingrid and Mrs. Kersh one and the same.

In It: Chapter 2, which exists in the same timeline as Welcome to Derry, the character portrayed by Joan Gregson has a couple of clues: the way she enunciates the word “father” and the line “nobody in Derry ever really dies,” both of which Ingrid has uttered, respectively, throughout the season, in a similar cadence to the film.

If Mrs. Kersh is indeed an real human and not just a disguise of the entity, it will not bode well for Ingrid, especially as she attempts to unravel the conspiracy behind the cinema slayings. Of course, we already know that It is responsible for the killings. That means the likelihood is high that she — along with Hank and Charlotte — will likely cross paths with the otherworldly being.

In a previous interview, Stephen Rider noted how pleased he feels about the latest story developments and that Hank is being given more depth. "I play roles as a Black actor on screen, and a lot of times you don’t get all the meat, you just deliver background information," he says. "For him to have that internal secret --- as actors, we have to develop those nuances independently. [...] But Hank has that."

With only three episodes left, expect more storylines to collide as the season races to its conclusion. After the disclosures from the latest episode, the truth about who Ingrid is shouldn’t be far off. And if she is indeed the same person, Ingrid will join the long list of doomed characters fated to become entwined with Pennywise for years into the future.