Villa Happ: a flying rat and childhood fear

Intro

If you’ve read my first post on here, the one about stalking my dad online, then it must not come as a surprise to you that I love a bit of scouring on the world wide web. A little bit of rummaging in the forums, combing on social media platforms, poking around on Google Maps, and most importantly: diving into the Wayback Machine and finding things that will eventually lead me down a rabbit hole of childhood memories.

Your attention may have been caught by the picture above this article, the one with the giant rat and the baby. Maybe that picture is the sole reason why you are visiting my little website, because you spotted this photograph that awakened a hazy recollection from when you were a kid. A memory that has been locked away inside of your head for a very long time and is coming up to the surface right now. Maybe you were scrolling away on Pinterest or someplace else on the internet and your interest suddenly peaked when laying your eyes upon this image of a grown person in a rat costume, a sense of faint nostalgia washing over you as you’re trying to figure out why that rat is so damn familiar. 

You’re definitely not the only one, so let me take you along on my journey of doing (very little) research on a bankrupted store, flying rats, traumatic memories and Dutch nostalgia. 

Roermond

It all began last year when I was visiting the Roercenter in Roermond, a small indoor shopping street that has seen better days, but despite all the vacant shops in the city centre, is surprisingly still going quite strong. It was during the winter, I was bored and on my own, aimlessly walking around stores like Takko and Shoeby when I started reminiscing about the past, the times when I was a tiny kid and my mom would take me to go shopping in Roermond on Saturdays. We would be out and about in the big city, having a fun time and visiting all kinds of different stores, my mom picking out and buying all the very stylish outfits I wore as a 4 year old. Creating memories together I still hold very dear to me. 

When I eventually started to get tired halfway through, we would go to the Roercenter and eat lunch at Het Pakhuis, a lunchroom in the middle of the indoor shopping street. From where I was sitting, devouring my ham and cheese tosti and drinking a cold Cola, I would spot something out of the corner of my eye. It was a children's clothing store I hadn’t remembered ever being in before. It was called Villa Happ and it looked very fun.

If tiny me had known what I know now, then I wouldn’t have asked my mom to go inside.

Villa Happ is where my first “traumatic” memory happened. Me and my mom would’ve been strolling through the store looking at cute childrens clothes, blissfully unaware about what would happen in just a few minutes time. Maybe I would’ve tried some clothes on while in there, or maybe I was just happily chatting with my mom when the Thing would happen, completely out of nowhere and taking us all by surprise. 

A giant rat hanging from the ceiling would appear, move around and scar me for life. 

I’m not kidding.

This rat completely horrified me as a child. I don’t actually know for sure whether it moved, if it made loud sounds or what exactly happened that scared me so much, but I was very frightened and experienced several nightmares because of this vile airborne rodent. From then on whenever my mom wanted to visit this horrible store, Villa Happ, I would be living in absolute fear for the eventual moment the rat would appear and start doing its thing again.

The end and a beginning?

Villa Happ filed for bankruptcy somewhere in 2010 and luckily quickly disappeared from my memories after that. The stores shut down and were replaced by new stores, which were probably also eventually replaced with even newer stores. Right now a Shoeby is situated in the store where the Villa Happ I visited used to be. I’ve not been able to find a single picture from Villa Happ in Roermond, let alone a glimpse of the trauma contraption that was a rat suspended high up in the store, moving around and scaring children. Maybe this was just something special to the Roermond store, or maybe other stores also had a fear machine hanging from the ceiling, who knows? Maybe we all deliberately buried that negative memory deep in our brain, hoping for it to never resurface. 

Sometimes I even think I hallucinated it all because no one ever knows what I’m talking about and there’s not a single trace of the existence of this horror online, but I know. I know it’s real. This Thing existed

And that brings me to my research, or well, to me doing some quick digging on the Wayback Machine. Can you even call that research? There’s honestly not much to it, I looked up Villa Happ on there and then looked across several different sites for all the pictures I could find of the inside of the store. The result of what must’ve been only 30 minutes of work? Well, there’s still no evidence that there was a rat flying through the Villa Happ store in Roermond, or any other store. But I have come across several pictures from the interior that awaken this intense sense of nostalgia inside of me, so I’ll share them with you here down below:

And with that my so-called research already comes to a very anticlimactic end. I hate writing emails so I’m not contacting any potential people that were once involved in these clothing stores, and that leaves me with nothing. There’s no grand reveal or anything like that, but there honestly doesn’t have to be. Maybe one of you people that reads this blogpost will have more information, and if you do, please share it with me. I would like to know that I’m not going crazy.

So I guess this is it, the story still has to be continued, but maybe not right now. Thank you for reading and until the next time when I’m diving into another not so very deep rabbit hole.

Edit: I wrote this a while back and in the meantime there has been a reddit post where people are indeed talking about a flying rat / mouse in Villa Happ, so at least I'm not going crazy!