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.

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!

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.

Sort of creepy. But is this face in Gregory’s house significant? Or just odd?
What do you think about it?
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Thanks, Jay, for the high-resolution screencaps, taken via emulator, that I cropped to make these pictures.
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“There used to be beautiful roses here, picked by Wendy from the rose garden. …But, as with all things, they wilted away with the passage of time.”

In this way, the game-makers want us to think of Wendy when we see a vase of roses. It seems likely to me that, when she wasn’t bedridden, it was Wendy’s assigned chore to collect roses for the vases of the orphanage. When Jennifer arrives at the orphanage during the first chapter of Rule of Rose, there are fresh roses in the vase of the Reception Room, which I think is Wendy’s welcome to Jennifer.

Wendy’s frequent trips to the rose garden brought her near to Gregory’s house, and gave her the opportunity to discover Gregory’s house.

The screencap enlargement seen above shows a vase with roses in it inside of Gregory’s house. I believe that this is a clue from the game-makers telling us that Wendy was on friendly terms with Gregory at an early date. This fits in with other associations with Wendy that we find in the house.

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In Gregory’s journal, we read:

Thursday, June 19

Clear skies. More weeding. I wanted to take Joshua out with me to the fields, but his coughs were getting worse, so I had him stay in bed.

Coughing, and being bedridden by illness, are also characteristic indicators of Wendy, pointing to Wendy being the “Joshua” of Gregory’s Journal.

I think that Jennifer’s arrival at Gregory’s in the game recapitulates Jennifer’s arrival at Gregory’s in her forgotten past. When else could she have watched, from outside of the cellar window, Gregory holding a gun to his head? Or examined the holes dug in the yard? Gregory left Jennifer in the rose garden and then she followed behind him as he went to his house. She looked around the house and yard for a while, then went down to the cellar, where she was greeted by Gregory and confined to the cellar.

I think that Jennifer sees that the last marked date on the calendar is June 27, and that the last entry in Gregory’s journal is June 27, because she arrived at Gregory’s house on that date, and saw those things before Gregory confined her to the cellar. She also saw the roses in the vase, indicating that Wendy had brought roses there, and was on a friendly basis with Gregory before Jennifer’s arrival (consistent with Wendy being the “Joshua” of Gregory’s journal entries).

Considering the extraordinarily messy and damaged appearance of Gregory’s house, it doesn’t seem to fit that the roses would be Gregory’s own doing. On the other hand, it does fit the sort of clue the game-makers would be expected to use to point our attention to Wendy’s presence in the house.

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Thanks, Jay, for the high-res screencaps which clearly show the roses.

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In my blog-post, See-all Walkthrough, with Commentary: “The Gingerbread House” Chapter (Part 6): Mysterious Ropes, I identified it as a rope, but, with the help of the high-resolution of Jay’s emulator-derived screencap, we can now see that it is a chain.

This chain, hanging near the corner of Gregory’s house, seems to me to be conspicuously odd. What is a hanging chain doing there? Any ideas about it, anybody? Notice that the bottom link seems to have broken.
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Jay: Would you please get a screencap of the top end of this chain? Maybe that will tell us more about it.

27 January

From W to J

Tomorrow night, I shall unlock your shackles. Let us live together forever.

everlasting

true love

i am yours

(“Gingerbread House” Cellar Bedroom)

But Jennifer didn’t arrive at the orphanage until (or shortly before) March 20, 1930.

20 March
From J to W

Wendy,
I’m here now, but I’m kind of afraid.
Everything is new to me.
I’m worried if I’ll get along with everyone.
(Sick Room, “Once Upon a Time”, letter on nightstand)

Where was she in between these times?
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There is almost no evidence to base an explanation on, but here goes:

I propose the hypothesis that Wendy’s escape plan involved getting Jennifer to a hospital (either directly or by showing Jennifer where the police station was and letting the police take her there). Wendy figured that Jennifer would end up at the orphanage with her eventually, after Jennifer got well.

Think about it. Do you think that crazy Gregory was able to keep Jennifer well fed during the 7 months that he had her? There are 4 unused sound files, #104 through #107, in which orphans describe someone (apparently Jennifer) as “Really scrawny.” after the same number of files say “A new girl. A new girl.” and “What’s she like?“.

January and February are very cold (snow) months in England. Jennifer likely got sick in the probably unheated cellar of Gregory’s home. Wendy may have felt that Jennifer would die of malnutrition and/or illness if she didn’t get Jennifer out of there. But it is hard to imagine Jennifer survivng homeless, or hidden in a place like an unheated shed, in such adverse weather. I think that it makes sense that Jennifer was in a hospital until she got her health back.

Note that, after Jennifer’s arrival at the orphanage, Wendy writes to Jennifer in a letter dated 25 July: “I am so relieved that you are well again!” Perhaps, even after release from the hospital to the orphanage, “really scrawny” Jennifer wasn’t fully recovered until several more months had passed.

These sound files may all relate to Jennifer’s arrival at the orphanage:

soundfile088
soundfile089
soundfile090
soundfile091
soundfile092
soundfile093
soundfile094
soundfile095
soundfile096
soundfile097
soundfile098
soundfile099
soundfile100
soundfile101
soundfile102
soundfile103
soundfile104
soundfile105
soundfile106
soundfile107

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I don’t know why my blog software is now making mp3 files play differently on my blog than has been the case in the past. I’m using the same plug-in. But now there seems to be a utilization of a QuickTime player involved (at least there is when I play them myself). Does your computer need to have a QuickTime player installed to play these sound files? Let me know.