[1] Source: "Bolder Museum’s New Path." Bolder Today News at 6. 2002.
[2] Submitted by: Emmeth Hosterly, second cousin of Cram Hosterly. Recovered from DVDs catalogued in his estate during a 2023 inventory.
[3] Uploaded to the archive: 8th April 2025. NotstalgiaArchive.org
Background
The Boulder Troll Wars never happened. That much has always been clear. The Boulder History Museum created the entire narrative in 2002 as part of an initiative to make the town’s past more exciting. They hired a fantasy novelist, built exhibits, and encouraged schools to incorporate the material into local history units. There were signs explaining it was all invented, and no one was ever meant to take it seriously.
We did not believe the Troll Wars were real. What interested the Notstalgia Archives was the creation of the story itself. The fabrication process. How a small-town museum decided to rewrite its own past and managed to convince the public, even temporarily, to go along with it. We thought it deserved proper academic attention.
We spent several years interviewing former staff, creative collaborators, and community members who claimed to have been involved in the original exhibit. Their accounts were vivid and often surprisingly detailed.
Some remembered costume fittings.
Others described heated debates about whether the trolls should have a flag.
One person provided handwritten notes from what she said was the initial planning session, dated in smudged pencil and signed “Wizard Mayor (temp).”
After eight years of research, we completed a draft of our book Making the Myth: The Construction of the Boulder Troll Wars, a comprehensive look at how the false history had been imagined, assembled, and presented to the public. It was only during the final round of review that one of our team members noticed a number of inconsistencies in the interviews.
Some of the participants seemed to contradict their own earlier statements. Dates did not match up. Entire sections of the project appeared to rely on a single source, and that source had since stopped responding to emails. One “consultant” on troll linguistics turned out to be a costume designer from Wisconsin who had never been to Colorado.
At that point we launched a full internal investigation into how we had been misled. We gathered records, reviewed transcripts, and reconstructed our own process step by step in order to understand where things had gone wrong. That investigation produced a second manuscript, which we called The Second Invention: False Memory and the Echoes of Fabrication. It was, we believed, a thoughtful and honest account of what had happened.
Earlier this year, we discovered that investigation had also been fabricated. The majority of the research had not taken place. The meeting minutes were copied from an old fundraising strategy document. The transcripts were composed in a shared drive folder called “Possible Dialogue.” One of the primary sources was later revealed to be a chatbot trained on fantasy film scripts.
We are currently preparing to publish all three manuscripts. A fourth volume, reflecting on the process of assembling the first three and tentatively titled Truth Remains Pending, is underway. We just need to check a few facts.
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