I just received a phone call from my mother in-law, who lives in Paducah, KY and who also never uses the Internet, so she has not been aware of the troll story.
She began to tell me "a true story" that someone down there had told in someone else down there. This woman, who has a child with down's syndrome told the exact same story, and that her son had caught him a troll and put him into the closet and she had come home from work and found him there, only this time it was a Jehovah's Witness. This story has run rampant, literally around the world this week. On my blog I have the ability to see how many readers I have, how they arrived to my site and usually what city they are in. In the past 4 days I have had more than 6,000 unique hits on my blog, literally around the world, all searching for the story of the troll in the closet. It is almost laughable, but truthfully it saddens me at how many people would lie and use their mentally challenged children in such a lie just to get a laugh. How crude is that? Maybe I am alone in this, but it really makes me hurt for these individuals who are mentally challenged and their own families use them in a lie so that others will laugh at them.
3 comments:
I just heard this "true story" last Saturday from a friend who worked with a lady who claimed it happened to her Aunt (who has an adult downs syndrome young'un) but it wasn't a Jehovah's Witness who was put into a closet. The story she told me had a midget as the troll. I actually believed her until I read your blog. Thanks for clearing it up.
BTW, I agree with you about using a mentally handicapped person as the subject of a joke. It's like a teacher in the summer time... NO CLASS!!!
I just heard this "true story" last Saturday from a friend who worked with a lady who claimed it happened to her Aunt (who has an adult downs syndrome young'un) but it wasn't a Jehovah's Witness who was put into a closet. The story she told me had a midget as the troll. I actually believed her until I read your blog. Thanks for clearing it up.
BTW, I agree with you about using a mentally handicapped person as the subject of a joke. It's like a teacher in the summer time... NO CLASS!!!
I just heard this one yesterday; someone heard it from someone in church who heard it from someone else ... In the version I heard, the young man was autistic, the "troll" was a midget and a Jehovah's Witness, and the mother found the autistic man shoving Skittles under the closet door to feed the "troll."
This story pinged my "urban legend detector" right away, but I didn't get a chance to Google it until just now. I got tons of hits on it; it's been very interesting to track an urban legend as it makes the rounds all over the world (the first version I saw online was from someone in Sweden).
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