AKRON, Ohio — 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 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.

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.

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. Inside the building, shelves and display cases are filled with troll dolls, no two of them alike. And the trolls keep coming. Often they’re donated by people who read or hear about her museum, Groom said. “I can’t turn away a troll,” she said.

It’s all a sideline for Groom, a psychiatric nurse who owns 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.