Some of the evidence that supports the idea that the historical R101 airship crash was the inspiration for the airship crash plot element in Rule of Rose:

The historical R101 was completed in 1929, the same year that the completion was announced of the airship Jennifer and her family flew on (in-game newspaper article dated 25 April 1929).

Both airships crashed during their first international flight.

Both airships were attempting to fly from Cardington to India.

Both were passenger airships that crashed with great loss of life and very few survivors.

The R101 was an airship that was uniquely like the Rule of Rose airship in terms of being a lavish floating hotel.

The R100 and the R101 ships were the first airships to adopt the style of using the interior of the ship for the passenger accommodation. And according to Wikipedia, “The demise of R101 effectively ended British employment of rigid airships.” Thus, it is easy to see that there were never ever any British airships that used the interior of the ship for the passenger accommodation, as did the airship of Rule of Rose, except these two airships, the R100 and the R101. They were the first and the last British airships like that. And of these two, the R100 and the R101, only the R101 matches the flight plan and luxury appointments of the Rule of Rose airship.

The above photos of a framed picture found in Hoffman’s closet show us that the game-makers left a specific naming of the R100 and R101 within the game itself. Thanks to BrYaN55 (comment-maker here) for discovering the clue and providing the pics.

I will be making a video for my RuleOfRoseMysteries YouTube channel, soon, that features new video footage supplied to me by Daniel (comment-maker here) that has an amazing discovery linking the R101 to a specific location in Cardington that appears to have inspired the setting of the orphanage grounds. I’ll announce it on my blog when it gets posted. Don’t miss it!

Subscribe to my RuleOfRoseMysteries YouTube channel here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/RuleOfRoseMysteries

This writing is located on Gregory’s desktop.

I think it says “Emma Wilson” at the top of the page. Does anyone else think so? It is easier to make out the “W” of Wilson if you realize that the “W” is written with the middle lines not coming to a point at the top but rather crossing each other.

Can anyone make out any of the rest of what is written? It would be great if this provided a clue as to why Gregory’s wife is not around.

Can anyone with an emulator manage to get a clearer photo of this?

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UPDATE!

Comment-maker Zen Maiton found a clearer (and shorter, and reversed) version of this writing on one of the desks of Hoffman (found in the Headmaster’s Quarters), the desk which has a phonograph and the P. A. equipment on it. The first letter of the last name can be clearly seen to be an “M”, and not a “W” as I previously thought, so the name cannot be Emma Wilson.

It is probably about a woman named Emma, not married to Gregory, who was two-timing Gregory for Mr. Hoffman!

I’m just kidding with the two-timing statement above.

It seems likely to me now that it is just a meaningless generic example of writing repeated several times in the game to minimize labor and expense for the game-makers (something seen before with wall cracks, etc.)

Thanks, Zen Maiton! Good job!!!

The article says:

Gregory was seen as a very kind man, but after his son, Joshua, was kidnapped or mysteriously died, he fell into depression and went insane.

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Gregory was seen as a very kind man,

Jennifer wrote to Wendy: “He’s a nice person… but he won’t let me leave.” Is that sufficient to state that Gregory “was seen as a very kind man”? What other evidence for this statement is there? Did anyone else (in the game) see Gregory as a very kind man?

Jennifer presumably had not (and perhaps has never) faced up to, or fit together, the evidence she had found that Gregory had kidnapped and killed three local children. One might quibble that Gregory’s guilt is not technically a “fact”, but I don’t think there is a reasonable alternative explanation to all the evidence indicating his guilt, and when the GameSpot/GameFAQs Rule of Rose forum was in its heyday, the overwhelming consensus among posters there was that Gregory was clearly guilty.

I think one should only say, Jennifer called Gregory “a nice man”.

but after his son, Joshua, was kidnapped or mysteriously died, he fell into depression and went insane.

If one chooses to accept the idea that the Joshua of Gregory’s diary was Gregory’s true son Joshua, then Gregory was already kidnapping and killing children while Joshua was still alive. How does that fit in with the claim that Gregory only went insane AFTER Joshua’s death? I don’t think it does fit. If one assumes that the Joshua of Gregory’s diary was actually Wendy, and that Joshua was already dead, it might be that Joshua’s death precipitated Gregory’s madness, but there are other possibilities for the causes of Gregory’s madness. It might be that Joshua’s mother’s death (or abandonment of her family) precipitated Gregory’s madness. It might be that Gregory was mad simply because he had an an organic brain disorder. Or that Wendy, pretending to be the dead Joshua drove him mad. It might be that Gregory killed Joshua in a surge of pre-existing organically-derived madness and had been wracked with terrible guilt ever since, or that Joshua died because Gregory was too mad to take care of him properly. We don’t know.

I think that the idea that Joshua was kidnapped is extremely unlikely to be correct. Gregory is, as stated above, for the most part certain to have been the kidnapper of children mentioned in the newspaper article, not some unknown other person.

That wiki is kind enough to link to me, and I expect that there may be many fans of my site that contribute to the wiki. I certainly don’t like the idea of hurting the feelings of any of my fans. And I’m sure the contributors to the wiki mean well.

I will link to pretty much any Rule of Rose fan-site (with the one notable exception being any site of the person sometimes known as SyberiaWinx). But I really don’t like the idea of linking to any wiki that attempts to sum up the plot or characters of Rule of Rose, because I think that there is a grave danger of closing people’s minds to the mysteries of the game by the presentation of information as factual which actually is not. This is a big problem specific to Rule of Rose, because it has many mysteries, uncertainties, and misleading elements built into the game.

Going to the wiki yesterday, the first and only article I read was on Gregory Wilson, and I needed to go no further in order to be much dismayed. Some problems are rather minor and don’t matter much, but others are—in my opinion—quite serious.

Let me focus on the most serious problems. Quoting the wiki:

after an illness brought the death of his beloved and only son, Joshua, he fell into depression and went insane.

First of all, we don’t know that an illness brought about the death of Joshua. The idea that Joshua was ill at all came from Gregory’s journal, but we don’t know whether the “Joshua” mentioned there was actually his son or not. I personally favor the hypothesis that the “Joshua” written about by Gregory was actually Wendy and that the illness described by Gregory is Wendy’s illness (the illness of Wendy can be seen as a clue to support this hypothesis). If so, then Joshua might not have been sick, and might have died from other causes.

We don’t know that Gregory’s insanity came about because of Joshua’s death, it could have been the other way around, that Joshua’s death came about because of Gregory’s insanity. We don’t know. If Joshua wasn’t sick (see above), many possibilities open up.

But let’s assume for a moment that the “Joshua” written about by Gregory WAS his son. If so, the kidnappings mentioned in the news article occurred BEFORE Joshua’s death. If Gregory was responsible for those kidnappings and probable deaths of children (and I think it is very highly probable that he was responsible—the entire issue of the kidnappings was over-looked in the article, by the way), then wasn’t he arguably insane BEFORE Joshua’s death?

Any way you look at it, this wiki sentence is obscuring the mysteries of the game, not helping to make the mysteries clear.

Other, lesser problems are so numerous in the Gregory Wilson wiki article that it will take me two or more follow ups to deal with them all. If this article is typical (and it wouldn’t surprise me if it is, as I picked it randomly) I fear that the wiki unintentionally does more harm than good for the fans who visit it.

Sorry.

Future comments relating to the trade demo finds should go here rather than to the Fortyfourth Month-iversary comment thread. And comments or links already placed there can be re-posted here without any worries about redundancy.

Thanks BrYaN55! Thanks Grandpaf! I look forward to exploring and discussing all the new Rule of Rose clues coming to light!

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From a comment posted by BrYaN55:

Anyway, I was finally able to upload the actual demo on my server, so if anyone is interested in it, you can download it here:

http://www.quebecgamers.com/dossiers/rule-of-rose-trade-demo/index.html (go to the bottom of the page and click on “Download”) For whatever reason, the direct link leads to a 404 page.

Files contained in the archive:
Rule of Rose [Trade Demo] [NTSC-U] [SLUS-28063].mdf
Rule of Rose [Trade Demo] [NTSC-U] [SLUS-28063].mds

Please, feel free to upload it anywhere you want and share it too! And don’t forget to let us know if you find something interesting like a debug room or anything else!

Gregory Wilson has many large wooden crates in his basement marked “British Antarctic Expedition 1907″.

The Wikipedia entry for “List of Antarctic expeditions” names only one expedition for the date 1907: the Nimrod expedition.

Among the crew of the Nimrod expedition there is no mention of the family name “Wilson”. There was an Edward Adrian Wilson who was offered the post of chief scientist and second-in-command, but he declined the offer. I haven’t come across any Cardington connection to Edward Adrian Wilson, or any of the Nimrod expedition crew, nor of anything else relating to the expedition (but I haven’t done an in-depth investigation).

There were some crates from the Nimrod expedition left behind in Antarctica, with some news coverage in recent years with respect to recovering Scotch whiskey and brandy from these crates for analysis. The recovery of these crates occurred years after the making of Rule of Rose, but I expect that there was likely some knowledge available (before the making of Rule of Rose) of crates left behind by the Nimrod expedition. I don’t know how to connect this to the story of Rule of Rose.

I’ll leave it to the readers of this blog to see if any of you can make sense of these Antarctic expedition crates in Gregory Wilson’s basement. Post your ideas and/or findings in the comments-thread, please.

Good luck on your efforts!

Note: Comment-maker Pegee was the first to find out about the Nimrod expedition crates left behind in Antarctica. Good job, Pegee!

I’ve previously written about the piles of leaves in the attic in these blog-posts:
Some Mysterious Piles of Leaves in the Attic (Part 1)
Some Mysterious Piles of Leaves in the Attic (Part 2).

Now, thanks to Jay, we have a picture of one of the two piles of leaves that are side-by-side in the attic (see above). I wish we had a lot more pictures of this area, because there are a lot of objects in this area (I haven’t noticed an obvious clue among them, but maybe others will). Pretty please, Jay, may we have some more pictures of this area and the objects here?

One indication that this area is important is that this area is lit up brightly, whereas most of the other areas–in the part of the attic that can only be accessed in “The Funeral” chapter–are dark. I think that this is an indication that the game-designers want to encourage us not to overlook this dead-end nook.

It is also worth considering that these leaves would have had to have been hauled up many flights of stairs to be brought to the attic. That is a lot of work, and I think it suggests that there is an important purpose.
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In the above picture, there isn’t a whole lot to analyze. There looks like there is a speaker (or an electric heater?) on the wall behind Jennifer’s head. The only new thought that has occurred to me is that the rafter looks like it would be plenty sturdy and convenient for use as a gallows.

Do you think it might be significant that all of the items next to the incinerator are on the same side of the incinerator as the “Stray Dog Kidnaps Kidz” drawing and its apparently related objects and ropes?

See my blog-post: Is the Location of the Incinerator Important? to understand why I’m asking about this.
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Thanks, Jay, for providing special high-resolution pictures for this blog-post.

The idea I’ve toyed with, in this regard, is the idea that Gregory paid visits to this part of the orphanage because he was hungry. He would look through the items by the incinerator for something edible, rather like homeless people today might dumpster-dive. Gregory, being crazy and all, might have been too dysfunctional to make money sufficiently to buy enough–or any–food, or to grow enough food to feed himself adequately. Perhaps he hunted animals some, but as winter approached he had more and more trouble growing and/or hunting food.

Perhaps he was heard by the orphans as he searched the incinerator area for food. Maybe even glimpsed. Or a footprint found. Perhaps it was only noticed that items there had been moved around.

Could the “strange items” by the “Stray Dog Kidnaps Kidz” drawing, be a response to this?

Mr. Hoffman wrote in his diary:

November 1930
The children are spreading rumors about a killer named “Stray Dog.” They say, “He comes at dusk under the cover of darkness and devours the children he kidnaps.”

Were the orphans worried that Stray Dog needed to be fed, for their own protection? Especially after the adults “disappeared”? Did they leave offerings of food to Stray Dog in this area? And other offerings in hope of making him friendly? Are the fork and spoon offered (look for the very tiny shiny objects far right of the picture) to help him eat the food that has been left for him?
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Thursday, I’ll put up some close-up pictures of the items near the incinerator. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have any pictures of the incinerator looking at it from the other side (from near the clothes-lines looking back toward the incinerator). Jay: If you are still willing to take another high-resolution emulator picture, that angle would be nice to have. I’m hoping to find something that might suggest Gregory’s presence there.

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See “What’s Going On in the Corner of the Play Area of the Orphanage? (Part 1)” for relevant screen-caps of the Play Area.
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On the map (top picture) the room labeled (26) is the Play Area, and the area labeled (25) is the Balcony. This, it seems to me, makes the window in the corner of the Play Area—that we’ve been examining during this series of blog-posts—the same window near which we see Jennifer and Eleanor standing on the balcony (middle picture).

Notice how the three ropes that hang down from the balcony rail line up with the window. Those ropes hang down toward the strange objects arrayed in front of the “Legend of Stray Dog / Stray Dog kidnaps kidz” drawing (bottom picture).
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Does what’s going on in the corner of the Play Area relate to the Balcony, the ropes, and the area beneath? Let me know what you think in the comments-thread.
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Thanks, Jay, for the high-resolution screen-caps.
Thanks, Lussh, for the map.