Julie’s DARK Secret! (Welcome Home)

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Julie is a killer. In the most recent Welcome Home update, there's a detail that reveals Julie's dark past, the reason she came to the neighborhood, and no matter how hard she tries, she can't escape the truth.

Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that'll make itself at home in any indie horror location. But as promised, I'm once again setting up shop in the neighborhood of Welcome Home. Last time, we did our typical ARG thing, walking through the recent update, solving the puzzles and decoding the secret videos and letters we found. We discovered that these characters we all know and love are also real people. I know, what a revelation for a puppet show. But what I mean by that is, what we're being shown as characters were actually the actors who puppeteer our friendly neighbors. We are being shown a symbolic story of how the actors of this show are so absorbed in their work that they are becoming their characters. And home, which is symbolic of the show itself, is what is keeping them there, controlling them and forcing them to avoid contact with the real world. There was a lot of ground to cover, so much so that there was still one thread we never got to pull. We spent a bunch of time exploring the clues in Joyful Julie's house, which was now covered in darkness. She was isolating herself from the world after she couldn't get the black flower to bloom and had a breakdown. This house led us to the final letters and clues, but we hadn't yet explored Frank's house, which was now suddenly available to us. In the previous update, he'd dug up Julie's plant and was hiding it, breaking down as a result. He too is now in darkness like Julie. Now, I had started to look into this before last episode, but when I did, I realized two things. One, it didn't really relate to anything we had talked about in the previous episode, but two, there was a lot more to the small things it did reveal than it initially seemed. I wanted to take my time with it and really figure out what it meant. Now, I think I know so much more about the dark secrets of this show, and how some of our neighbors are hiding from their past. So dust off your shoes on the welcome, Matt Loyal Theorists, as we set foot into the dark secrets hiding inside of Frank's house. Unlike Julie's house, Frank's is much more interactive. You can move between the living room, the kitchen, and the study, looking at the furniture and whatever else you might find, like a gun in the closet. Kitcheners were crazy back then, huh? Obviously, something is up. And if you go into Frank's study, you'll find his journal. Inside is a key that you can take, and after exploring all of the downstairs, you can move to the upstairs, where you can step into Frank's room and see him sleeping in bed. If you step closer and click on him, he will then disappear. And your cursor is now a gray hand. Look in the mirror in Frank's room, and you will now see Frank's reflection, as if we are now in control of Frank. At this point, the house becomes very different, and rather than a real house with a normal layout, it becomes a kind of crazy nightmare house. Stepping out of Frank's room is a door, but it's in gray scale. You can walk down the stairs and move around the room, which doesn't have any furniture, but rather images of furniture stuck on the wall. There are a few rooms to explore here, like one with overgrown plants inside, or Frank's back garden with a hand drawn sky above it. This, along with the pictures of furniture on the wall, remind us what we learned last time. It's not real furniture or a real back garden, it's a set for a show. However, there is one room that is the exception. After going outside, you can return to the house and find yourself in a white room. The furniture here looks real, and more importantly, it doesn't look like the rest of the house. This looks like the real Frank's bedroom, his puppeteer's room, and there are some striking interactions found here. In the room, there is a family portrait which is covered in black. The URL name for this image is called Family Portrait. Like we said last time, Frank is beginning to forget details from the outside world, as he's become more and more absorbed into his work. A family portrait blacked out is representing that forgetfulness of his family, things from the outside. The weirdest part is that when you click on certain items, it makes a red screen appear. There's a cracking sound, and then the item suddenly has blood underneath it. I admit the room needed a little more color, but this was not what I meant. I was thinking more of a nice millennial green or something. I'm kidding, I hate that trend too. Regardless, I think it's time for us to leave. Clicking on the closet returns you to the back room with three doors. The central door is just an image of a door, but then I noticed it was peeling in the upper right corner. I peel it back, and it reveals a tunnel that you can crawl through, sending you back to the Our Home page. So that's the basic run through of Frank's house. Weird and creepy confirms a lot of what we talked about last time, but there are actually much darker secrets here when you start to take a closer look at things. For example, who we are in this scenario. You might think we are just on the website exploring Frank's room, but when you look at Frank's grandfather clock, it's clear we are someone else. The grandfather clock shows a shadow being cast over it, and the shadow is undeniably Wally darling. Wally is the one walking through this house, and it gets darker when you think about what happens when Wally steps into Frank's room. Frank was sleeping on the bed, but when you click on him, he disappears. And the hand cursor then changes from Wally's hand, which we have been using across the entire website, to Frank's hand. And by looking in the mirror, we can now see that we are in control of Frank. In Wally's phone call to us at the beginning of the update, he told us, Climb a weak side, rip it open, climb inside, and mend the line. He was talking about how he takes control of the neighbors, and now we are getting a live performance of it. Wally has gone into Frank's house and seized control of him. But remember, this world is a representation of what is happening in the real world through the world of the puppets. So Wally isn't actually climbing inside and taking control of this human, it's about using fear and isolation to metaphorically climb inside them and take control. We're just seeing it through the lens of these puppets, where Wally is literally climbing inside and moving Frank around. At this point, we have explored every room there is to explore. However, there are certain rooms that have a chance of appearing differently when going in multiple times. Some of these are just things like different windows when going down the stairs. But these variants tell us another story, a much darker story about the neighbors. There is a chance that the backyard will appear red, with the shed sunken into the ground. Turning back to the house, the upper window has black roots growing out of it. In the last update, Frank was getting paranoid about the black flower he had dug up and hid it in the potting shed, thinking that now it may have moved. This variant of the shed shows us that Frank may have actually been onto something. The flower is still alive. When crawling through the tunnel to escape, there is another incredibly rare variant that can occur here. As you crawl through the tunnel, a red light appears at the end, and your arrow cursor becomes a shovel. As you edge closer to the red light, a silhouette will appear looking into the tunnel. At this point, I wanted to turn around and just pretend I didn't see anything. But when I tried, a prompt on the screen just says, bury me. And then, the face of this silhouette appears right in front of you as a brief scream plays. Love that. Yep, not terrifying at all. What a nice, cozy, safe franchise this is. But who the heck was that? I wanted to suspect it was a neighbor. However, when brightening the image of the face, you can see that it has a nose, one that doesn't match any of our neighbors that we've met so far. However, it did remind me of something else, the black flower. There's a distinctive feature of this flower, the red spiral on top, which looks very similar to our jump-scare as face and their red spiral eyes. On top of that, there's the cursor becoming a shovel when you see the red light. This flower was dug up by Frank when Julie couldn't make it bloom. It's also worth noting that in Julie's house, where the present from Frank used to be, if you enhance the image, it reveals a tunnel of her own, just like Frank's. This tunnel could be connected to Frank's, connecting both Julie and Frank to the flower's burial, and therefore, this figure. This figure is the black flower, or at least I believe the real world counterpart to this story's flower. The in-universe story might be about a weird black flower that doesn't bloom, but as we've talked about a bunch already, what we're seeing isn't the real story, it's just the lens the story is being told from. This character is what the flower is supposed to represent. Julie, or Julie's puppeteer, did something that she was afraid of others finding out, and Frank helped cover it up. And I think I know exactly what that something is, and it's all thanks to another one of Welcome Home's concept images. Welcome Home's creator, Clown, posted a bunch of concept art for the Welcome Home characters and the world on their Tumblr page before the project was fully realized. We've used some of these images in the past, like these images of Wally, which alerted us to the idea that this might be a cult. Note the cross cuff links and the Baphomet as above so below pose, a phrase which then popped up later within the ARG. Now, to be clear, I know that Clown has previously stated that these images are not canon to Welcome Home. However, as time's gone on, these images have begun to play a part in the wider story. This image we used of Frank in the past showed up in the In Universe Playfellow Exhibition, for example. So with that in mind, take a closer look at this image of Julie. In it, we see Julie sitting in a field of flowers, and right behind her is a black figure with raggedy hair and a shovel dripping with something. To me, there are just too many connections to ignore here between this unknown silhouette and the jumpscare character that we've been talking about. But those features, the crooked body, frizzy hair and blood dripping from the shovel, it's hard to deny this looks like someone that has been killed. Slap on to that, the prompt when trying to escape the red light that says bury me, and the fact that Frank's items when clicked all have blood underneath them, it becomes quite clear that the incident that Julie is hiding is a murder. Julie killed someone and with the help of Frank, covered it up. But what's even crazier is I can tell you not just that this happened, I can tell you when it happened and why it's only now becoming a problem. Earlier I said that the chances of this red tunnel encounter were extremely rare, and I meant it. Looking into the source code of this page, there is a 1 in 1,965 chance that the red tunnel appears. That's a very low chance, but the number is also oddly specific. I get wanting to make the number really high, but if you wanted it to be a low chance, wouldn't you have just made it 1 in 1,000? 1 in 2,000 maybe? You know, a nice round number. Why make it that specific number? Because 1,965 isn't just a probability value, it's a year. 1965 is the year the murder took place, and that's why that probability value is assigned to the dead body. At first, I wondered if this murder maybe occurred in the early days of producing the Welcome Home TV show. Julie killed a crew member and tried to cover up, which is why the show mysteriously went off the air a few years later, and why we're seeing all of this now happen within the show's story. Someone had discovered the truth. But the dates, they just didn't really line up for me. We know the first episode of Welcome Home aired in October of 1969, four years after the 1965 date. Now, Lee will tell you that it takes a long time to develop a show to the point of getting it on the air, but four years is excessive, especially back in the 1960s. A great example of this is Joan Ganz Cooney, creator of Sesame Street. They produced a study in 1966 examining the potential uses of television in preschool education, and two years later, Cooney and Lloyd Morisette created the Children's Television Workshop, which debuted its first program, Sesame Street, on November 10th, 1969 Conception to air took Joan three years, a whole year less than the four years we've been talking about. But on top of that, we know that Julie was only hired as talent by the Playfellow Workshop, meaning the company name had already been created, which in the case of Sesame Street happened only a year before the first episode aired. This means that the incident in 1965 was something that happened before Welcome Home started, before Julie was even hired. This brings Julie's character into a whole new light. Thanks to the letters from last time, we know that the real Julie left home rather abruptly to follow a new opportunity, exactly like her character, Julie Joyful, did in the show. Even when the Joyfuls tell Julie to come home, she's weirdly reluctant. Julie, when are you going to finally join our band? That sounds...