Alliance: Sherry Groom has a thing for beady eyes and impish grins.
Thousands of thousands of them, in fact.
The Cuyahoga Falls resident is the proprietor of the Troll Hole, a museum 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.
“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 vignette 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.
Groom has dozens of examples of Dam trolls from the 1960s, marketed in the United States under the name Norfin, as well as the Wish-nik dolls from the same era that were made by Uneeda Doll Co. She said each of Dam’s dolls wore one of 13 expressions, while Wish-niks all had the same face but used the clever marketing slogan, “Rub my hair and make a wish.”
Some Wish-nik trolls were dressed to carry out themes — among them, a Nurse-Nik, a Bride-Nik, a Smart-Nik in cap and gown and a No Good-Nik in jailhouse stripes.
Groom’s collection also includes a huge array of trolls made in the 1980s and later by Russ Berrie and Co. They include trolls boasting the colors of professional football and baseball teams, trolls dressed like storybook characters and even a troll Chippendale dancer. One troll on display sports a T-shirt declaring, “I ª Akron.”
There are other curiosities, such as tiny troll pencil toppers from gumball-type machines, a rare two-headed troll and a doll dressed like Rod Stewart, which collector Kerner designed and presented to the rock star with the hair any troll would envy.
And the trolls keep coming. Often they’re donated by people who read or hear about her museum, Groom said. Just since it opened, she figures she’s received 500 to 600 of the dolls.
“I can’t turn away a troll,” she said.
The museum isn’t just a toy display, though. One section is dedicated to the trolls of Scandinavian folklore, ill-tempered creatures who blended into the landscape and could be as big as a mountain.
Sculptor Miller crafted life-size creations for this part of the museum, including a waterfall with a troll hiding underneath and a walk-through re-creation of a troll’s cavelike home. Visitors can even trip-trap across the bridge from the folk tale Three Billy Goats Gruff, as long as they’re mindful of the trolls below.
The museum has two accompanying shops: a gift shop next door, which is where the museum tours start, and a gallery that sells fine and wearable art including whimsical fairy coats and felted garments. The complex is also the site of periodic art classes and the place where Groom does troll readings, which she said are more like brief life-coaching sessions.
It’s all a sideline for Groom, a psychiatric nurse who owns the Villa Maria, a dementia care facility in Alliance. She said she started the museum and art emporium to support her nonprofit Arts for Alzheimer’s program, and she hopes they’ll also provide the added benefit of drawing tourists to the struggling town.
Oddly, Groom can’t even pinpoint what it is about trolls that enthrall her.
Maybe it’s just magic.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.