It's Time to Go Troll Hunting in North Carolina
Thursday, October 30, 2025
The magic and mystery of Danish artist Thomas Dambo’s creations land across the Tarheel State
By Elliott Harrell
My nephew spots the top of a head sticking up out of the trees before I do, shrieking with delight and darting into the woods of Raleigh’s Dix Park to see it up close.
He’s glimpsed Dax, a giant wooden troll who appears to be running away from his brother Dux to find a hiding spot for hide-and-seek. Dux has his eyes covered, but like most kids, he’s peeking just a bit to keep Dax in sight.
The brothers are the work of Thomas Dambo, a Danish artist known for the 171 larger-than-life trolls he’s built around the world using recycled wood and other material. “Our world is drowning in trash while we are running out of natural resources,” Dambo says. “I choose to spend my life showing the world that beautiful things can be made out of trash.”
This fall, a family of seven trolls has taken up residence across the cities of Raleigh, High Point, and Charlotte, North Carolina, marking Dambo’s largest permanent installation in North America.
While the Dix Park Conservancy had reached out to Dambo a couple of years ago to put the project in motion, the city of High Point and the team behind Charlotte’s troll happened to reach out earlier this year, too, with no knowledge that the others had done the same. “Maybe serendipity is a good way to describe it,” says Dambo, who made the decision to connect the trolls as a family.
Dax and Dux, along with baby Dix, Mother Strong Tail, and Daddy Bird Eye, have settled in Dix Park near downtown Raleigh already. Teenager Little Sally will arrive in High Point by November 8, while brother Pete with the Big Feet will make his home in Charlotte around the same time. In addition, twelve of Dambo’s trolls will temporarily visit the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville from November 15 through February 17, 2026.
A small contingent of skilled builders from Dambo’s team leads construction, but the trolls come to life in large part through the work of volunteers; up to 35,000 people have pitched in to build the sculptures over the last decade, Dambo says. Completing the Dix Park trolls took three weeks, twenty-four tons of reclaimed lumber, and more than three hundred volunteers from North Carolina and nine other states—including myself.
I’d never used a power tool before I picked up a jigsaw one morning to cut supports for Mother Strong Tail’s leg and to build the underlying shape of her back calf. I was worried about cutting my finger off, but more worried I’d mess something up. To Dambo, though, involving as many people as possible is more important than getting the details exactly right. “It’s just a choice I took,” he explains. “For me, inclusion weighs over perfection of shape, and I’ve made the aesthetic a bit more rough so we don’t need to perfectly cut everything.”
When I’ve mentioned the trolls to friends and neighbors, people either know them and love them, or they give me a hard, inquisitive look. But as I elaborate about their enormous scale and incredible level of detail—like Mother Strong Tail sleeping with one eye open to keep watch over her children or baby Dix holding the end of her mother’s 645-foot tail for comfort—I see wonder and fascination start to unfold. “I think that people really just resonate with the mission of taking something that’s waste and turning it into the solution,” Dambo says. “That’s probably also why I like it—because I like to be a part of something that is a good thing for the world.”
But it’s not just the mission that captures people’s attention. There’s also an element of mystery, storytelling, and adventure.
First, there’s an unspoken rule among Dambo’s fans not to spoil the thrill of discovery for someone else. This means you (hopefully) will never find exact directions to each statue, but instead can use his Troll Map as a guide.
Then there’s each troll’s story, posted on plaques beside the statues. The poems, penned by Dambo, read like fairytales, explaining the natural resources each troll guards or warning of the dangers humans pose. North Carolina’s troll family, for instance, is trying to protect old Grandmother Tree, so they’ve cast a spell making it impossible for humans to find her. But Dambo has built a treasure hunt into this installation: Each troll bears a secret symbol on its necklace. If you find all seven, you can use the Troll Map to locate the enchanted tree. That is, if you “swear to never speak it, eat it, never to repeat it,” according to the poem.
So while I won’t tell you where these mystical trolls are, I’ll give you a few clues.
Trolls like to be in nature. Four of the five in Dix Park are reasonably close together, while one keeps watch on the city from a completely different vantage point. You’ll find Little Sally about a ten-minute walk from the train station in High Point, and Pete with the Big Feet will be close enough to the Charlotte airport to see planes on their final descent.
And Grandmother Tree? Well, she’s closer to Raleigh than anywhere else, but you’ll have to do all of the legwork there. Happy hunting.It's Time to Go Troll Hunting in North Carolina
