AKRON, Ohio | Sherry Groom has a thing for beady eyes and impish grins.
Thousands of thousands of them, in fact.
The Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, resident is the proprietor of the Troll Hole, a museum in Alliance, Ohio, that houses her world-record collection of troll dolls as well as more than 10,000 artifacts related to the toys and the legend that inspired them.
This is where ancient folklore meets 20th-century kitsch.
Groom and her husband, Jay, opened the museum in June to house the fuzzy-haired troll dolls and paraphernalia she spent decades amassing. Its main attraction are the dolls that earned her inclusion in Guinness World Records for the largest troll collection, an assemblage that stood at 2,990 dolls when the record was set on Oct. 26, 2012, and continues to grow.
It all started sometime in the 1960s, when Groom was one of countless American kids who found troll dolls under their Christmas trees. Trolls were the hot novelty toy from about 1963 to 1965, and she and her sisters all got them.
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"But I was the only one who became captivated by it," she said. "Just part of my quirky personality."
Years later, she started picking up the dolls in secondhand shops and antique stores, because for some reason she just couldn't pass them by. It wasn't exactly an obsession at first. She figures she owned 20 or 30 until the late 1980s, when the dolls enjoyed a resurgence.
Suddenly trolls were everywhere, and Groom's passion went into overdrive.
Her collection mushroomed. She even bought out the inventory of Trolling Around, a former museum and gift shop in Whitman, Mass., and part of the collection of its owner, Lisa Kerner.
"First it was a few shelves," she said. "Then the shelves got overfilled. Then it was a troll room."
Now it's an entire museum, which Groom shows to visitors while costumed as a huldra, an alluring female troll from Norwegian mythology.
Groom's collection is housed in two buildings, one of which displays newer trolls and associated artifacts. There's a scene of a girl's bedroom from the late 1980s, complete with troll sheets, a troll chair, troll wall hangings and a troll Barbie. There are troll pencils and cologne and fruit snacks. There are troll dolls that resemble celebrities (curiously advertised as "anatomically correct") and trolls that stick out their tongues or make rude body noises when you squeeze their bellies.
There's even an X-rated troll. "We keep him in the box," Jay Groom said.
The heart of the collection, however, is in a separate building guarded by troll figures inspired by Norwegian folklore, which occupy a mountain sculpture outside the door. The artwork was created by Akron landscape sculptor Mark "Rockman" Miller, who also created a number of other displays in the museum as well as a pair of trolls that decorate the museum's facade.
Inside the building, shelves and display cases are filled with troll dolls, no two of them alike. They all share the features made famous by the dolls' originator, Danish woodcutter Thomas Dam: broad face, pug nose, beady eyes and shocks of long, fuzzy hair, often in vibrant colors.
