Road Trolls

Stock Image of a Troll road sign

What is a Road Troll?

To start off, What exactly is a troll? A troll is a creature birthed in tales from Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore. Their characteristics vary based on different accounts but they do share some distinct features. Trolls are said to be giant, monstrous beings, who sometimes have the power to control magic. Some sources claim that their appearances very ugly and grotesque looking, usually with warts and a green skin tone while others say that they look and behave exactly like human beings, with no particularly grotesque characteristics about them. All trolls are said to usually be Hostile to men, and also connected to landmarks which the "haunt", killing trespassers and other people at night. Their haunting of landmarks and leaving at night is also backed by claims that if they are exposed to sunlight they burst or turn into stone. Over the years, the depiction of trolls has changed drastically and in more recent tales, trolls often are human-sized or tiny beings similar to dwarfs and elves. In children's tales and stories, trolls are usually said to live under bridges, menacing travellers and making them perform tasks and riddles while haunting them with tricks. Nowadays, trolls have become very popular in movies and books becoming one of the more staple fictional creatures to act as a villain for a hero or a monster to haunt a bridge.

This mystery is about a type of troll which may actually exist in real life making them less fiction and more fact. Road trolls are said to haunt secluded roads and highways shrouded in the darkness of night and the whole mystery surrounding them is a deeply weird one which would probably be given no thought to if it wasn't for the various reports and sightings of the creature. There are a variety of far-out reports giving similar details of a strange hairy troll-like creature that is said to prowl highways and roads, mostly targetting long haul truckers who are alone on the roads at night along darkened highways in the Midwest portions of the United States. These trolls are usually described as a massive humanoid figure covered in hair which is often covered by in stained, tattered clothing, and strangely most reports also claim them having some sort of wooden peg in place of a leg. They are often mistaken for a human due to their similarity in shape and the lack of light until drivers near the creature and notice the distinct troll-like features.

Sightings & Evidence

While there are quite a few sightings and accounts of this monster, the first proper sighting I could find was from 1981 by a truck driver named Gary Durbin, who was from Illinois. According to Durbin, he was travelling through a secluded stretch of road between the Tyson Mountain in Arkansas, just east of a large National Forest, and was on his way to Chicago with a cargo of live chickens. He said that the drive was quite perilous with many sharp turns and dark unlit roads and at a point, he noticed a strange-looking man who seemed to be homeless and had a peg for a leg while the rest of his body was covered in hair who was standing at the corner of a sharp turn. Durbin passed him shrugging it off as a homeless mountain man who must have been mentally ill to have been standing at such a sharp turn and continued on his journey forgetting about what he saw, but little did he know that he would have another encounter with the creature shortly after.

Durbin was continuing on his journey and made it to a truck stop a little further down the road and stopped for a cup of coffee, after which he hit the road again, travelling across into Missouri and reaching a rest stop where he stopped for a short break. A while later when he was leaving the rest area Durbin says that he saw the strange hair-covered man with his peg-leg just standing at the side of the road intently staring at him. This shocked Durbin greatly and he was most of all confused as to how the man got so far in front of him while seeming to have no vehicle and being on foot. The man then went into the forest and Durbin left but over the next few years, he has seen the creature 5 more times and does not know why or how but has been able to make out some features of the creature better. He claims that the troll stands a bit taller than 6’0″ with a peg below his right knee which looks to be made of wood. He also says that it has a lot of hair that is light brown and covers his entire face and body and bove that it wears ragged clothes and carries a little purse type pouch over its waist.

After Durbin, the nest good sighting was In 2000 when 2 people claimed to have seen the creature. The first sighting was in March by a trucker named Brad Royalty has claimed to have seen a hair-covered man with a wooden peg leg standing alongside a highway rest stop in Oklahoma. Brad claimed that he initially thought it was a deranged man but continued on staring freaking him out after which he ran away. Later in the year, a married couple who worked together as truck drivers saw a similar-looking creature in Boonville, Missouri but there isn't much information online about this specific sighting. 

The next and most recent real sighting is from June of 2003 by a pastor named Jim Washington who was driving along a highway to reach a church service in Tennessee. He was just outside of a small town when he was the hairy creature limping along the side of the highway. The pastor first crossed the creature but later thought that he may be an injured man limping to the nearby town and turned around with the thought of helping him. Within a few minutes he had returned to where he saw the limping man but he was nowhere to be seen even after waiting for quite some time. Washington said that the man looked very strange and grotesque looking with an obvious disfigurement of the leg that and because of that he turned around to help him but he somehow disappeared within the 2-3 minutes it took to turn around.

According to author Jerry D. Coleman who has written about road troll extensively in his books "Strange Highways" and the follow-up, "More Strange Highways" there have been a total of 11 such sightings of the hairy Road Troll between 1981 and 2003. The reports location varies across all parts of the United States but is mostly seen around Illinois and what is special in this case is that all the sightings are very similar in the description of the creature with the hair, tattered clothes, and peg leg The people who have made these claims are also usually normal truckers and people commuting on highways instead of the usual conspiracy theorists and mystery hunters increasing the legitimacy of these claims.

Conclusion

While this is a very strange mystery with many sightings, I personally think it's not actually a set of mystical creatures who live alongside highways. The possibility of a species of creatures living in places so close to human traffic just seems too unlikely for me to believe. But that leaves 2 possibilities to this mystery, the first being that there is an actual hitchhiker with a peg leg and the other that people have mistaken normal people for trolls due to the darkness and road conditions. The problem with there being an actual peg-legged hairy man is the number of sightings and the strange distance between them. An actual man wouldn't be able to cover so much distance at such speed and also why would a person walk alongside highways for 22 years. Due to this, I think the initial 1 or 2 sightings may have been of such a drifter and then the rest have been normal people that have been mistaken for the "road troll" due to the lack of visibility and people's imagination. But then again this is just my opinion and who knows what creatures are out in the world's darkness.

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