If there was any doubt that this year’s Frozen Dead Guy Days would live up to its strange name and reputation, it was dispelled by the sight of a grown man in a Bigfoot costume who was among those cheering on teams of other lunatics in peculiar getups racing coffins around a rodeo-style corral.
What’s a coffin race, you ask? It’s an activity in which teams of six with names like the Night Mares (sporting horse-head masks) and the Zombie Tigers (outfitted in Tigger onesies) cart one of their own in an open coffin around an obstacle course while shooting hoops through a giant skull.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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“And then you kind of sprint to the end, and whoever’s in the coffin has to jump out,” says Kyle Collins, a member of the Bigfoot crew. “It’s a lot of fun.”
Indeed, the races are the signature event of the annual Estes Park, Colorado, festival, with the weirdness continuing throughout the March weekend. There’s a “dead guy”–themed bar crawl, a gala called the Royal Blue Ball that feels like a prom for the undead, a “Burrr…lesque” performance, and a costume competition in which contestants dress like the festival’s guest of honor, a 125-year-old Norwegian man frozen in a vat of liquid nitrogen at the nearby Stanley Hotel.
Grandpa, as the preserved body of Bredo Morstøl is affectionately known, is both the festival’s main attraction and the sole exhibit at the hotel’s so-called International Cryonics Museum. Morstøl is entombed in a 10-foot-tall steel tube, head down (to keep his brain in the coldest part of the chamber), within a plexiglass showcase guarded by a few tour guides behind a velvet rope.
But what’s even stranger than the exhibit and the larger event itself is how they came to exist in the first place, thanks to a Norwegian man’s fascination with cold temperatures and the prospect of immortality.
ON THIN ICE
From 1993 to 2023, Morstøl was kept in a DIY plywood-and-styrofoam crypt in a shed in the nearby Colorado town of Nederland, the lone resident of an abandoned and never-to-be-completed amateur cryonics “facility” started by his grandson, Trygve Bauge.
When Bauge, a citizen of Norway, moved to Colorado in 1980, he brought with him a keen interest in cryonics, a practice based on the theory that future scientific breakthroughs will allow a properly frozen body to one day be reanimated. When he got word in 1989 that his beloved grandfather had died in Oslo, Bauge hatched an ambitious plan to freeze him and transport his body to Colorado—after a nearly four-year layover at a cryopreservation firm in San Leandro, California.
In 1993, Bauge, now living in Nederland, placed Grandpa in a blue sleeping bag, which he in turn placed in a stainless steel sarcophagus inside a homemade crypt the size of a large hot tub. This contraption was housed inside a flimsy tin shed high up on a lonesome, windy hillside overlooking the town. Grandpa was kept in a deep freeze with a constantly replenished supply of dry ice.
The slapdash nature of this experiment was reflected in another structure Bauge was building next to the shed, the planned headquarters of his very own cryonics facility, where he hoped to someday store multiple bodies, all in a deep freeze.
“The whole idea was it was supposed to be earthquake-proof, fireproof, bombproof,” says Bo “Iceman” Shaffer, Grandpa’s longtime caretaker and the first person Bauge hired to keep Grandpa on ice. Made of cement, steel beams, and rebar—“I’d say almost between 40 percent and 50 percent by volume rebar,” Shaffer says—the slate-gray headquarters, complete with battlements, is an unmitigated eyesore in an otherwise quaint neighborhood.
As is often the case with men of eccentric ambition, the nascent cryonics operation was derailed by the details—namely, that Bauge’s visa allowing him to live in the United States had expired. The oversight was discovered after he cracked a poorly conceived joke about hijacking an airplane in 1986, but it took authorities a few years to catch up to him. He was deported to Norway in 1994.
No one in Nederland had any idea what Bauge had been up to until a few days after he’d been put on a plane to Oslo. It was then that his mother, who had also moved from Norway to be closer to her father’s remains, came down from the unfinished cement structure and told a reporter that she was worried that her father’s dead body out in the shed would melt once all the dry ice was gone.
Suffice it to say that Nederland didn’t immediately embrace the dead man who would eventually become its most famous resident. News of Bauge’s morbid experiment went viral, drawing attention from around the world.
“In the beginning, [Grandpa] was persona non grata up there,” Shaffer says, noting that when he was originally contracted to make the ice runs once a month, he felt he had to sneak in and out of town.
“We had to come up here, rain or shine, no matter what, no matter how bad or how good it was,” he says. “If not, as Trygve would say, we’d kill his grandfather.”
That hint of sentimentality was shared by Shaffer’s successor, Brad Wickham, a former healthcare worker who took over ice-delivery duties in 2013.
“It’s part of [Grandpa’s] care plan just to make sure he stays frozen,” Wickham says.
Shaffer and Wickham never forgot that under all that ice was a human being who, as unlikely as it may be, could theoretically one day rise again. It all depended on how well Shaffer and Wickham were doing their jobs.
GRAND-DAD WITH GRANDPA
Frozen Dead Guy Days was conceived in 2002 by the Nederland Chamber of Commerce as a way to attract visitors during the winter doldrums. By 2005, after frenzied media coverage, the annual event was in full swing, its popularity well beyond what anyone had imagined and the bar for weirdness set high. Attendees could talk Grandpa’s caretakers into giving them a peek inside the shed, where they’d often toast the old man with a shot of Old Grand-Dad whiskey chilled in the same dry ice that packed the crypt. More persuasive visitors were allowed to actually crawl into the crypt and lie down on the ice for a picture.
The festival reflected the ghoulish camp of Grandpa’s makeshift existence, with as many as 20,000 people overrunning the small mountain town of about 1,500 to pay their drunken tribute. Nederland’s First Street, still as narrow as it was when residents rode horses into town, would be hopelessly jammed with a parade of hearses painted in the full spectrum, from Day-Glo to matte black. Drinking and pot smoking started early and rarely paused. Costumes covered every shade of goth, every interpretation of what a frozen corpse might look like were it to be reanimated, and every other throw-out-the-rule-book permutation in between, as if Beetlejuice had collided with Woodstock.
But even before COVID caused the festival to pause from 2020 to 2021, Nederland had grown tired of the crowds, the traffic congestion, and the risk of injury, according to Amanda MacDonald, who began running the festival in 2004 and bought it in 2012. Hefty permit fees, rising insurance costs, and ongoing squabbles with town leaders finally led her in 2022 to sell the festival to Estes Park, Grandpa included.
The moment of truth for Shaffer and Wickham came when a team of specialists showed up to move Grandpa to his new resting place at Estes Park’s Stanley Hotel, famous for inspiring Stephen King’s The Shining. That meant opening the casket to make sure there really was an old Norwegian man inside and to see what kind of shape he was in.
No one knew quite what to expect because no one other than Bauge had actually seen Grandpa. Over the decades, there had been a scare or two that might have compromised his condition, like when the original tin shed blew to pieces during a windstorm. By the time Shaffer could check him out, all the dry ice was gone. “He did not thaw out,” he says, “but he got a little warmer than we’d like.”
For his part, Wickham was afraid of the sheer weight of the ice on the body. “I was hoping he wasn’t broken. That was the biggest fear,” he says. “He was frozen. He could shatter, and I was loading a thousand pounds of ice onto him every two weeks.”
There’s a secret video of the unveiling. In it, the casket is open, and Grandpa lies in his blue sleeping bag, surrounded by the misty fog of sublimating dry ice, which happens to create the perfect spooky atmosphere. The bag is unzipped; the camera zooms in. It’s the first time anyone has seen Bredo Morstøl in 30 years.
And he looks—remarkable. Other than a flattened nose (apparently the result of the casket originally having been put into the crypt face down), he looks ready to rub his eyes and sit up. Even his skin looks good. Note to future Frozen Dead Guy Days cosplayers: Being on dry ice for three decades gives your skin a healthy-looking pink hue.
“It’s like crazy relief,” Wickham says, knowing that he and Shaffer, for 10 and 18 years, respectively, did indeed take good care of the frozen dead guy and that Bauge’s experiment in backyard cryonics has, at least to some degree, been successful.
NOT-SO-ETERNAL PEACE
But there’s now a new measure of success for Frozen Dead Guy Days: the number of tourist visits to the Stanley Hotel’s International Cryonics Museum. The result is that the festival is a little less loose and interesting than in the past. “It’s a totally different vibe,” says MacDonald.
Nonetheless, at the merrily morbid Royal Blue Ball kicking off this year’s festival, Wickham watched the colorful zombie horde dancing to the Village People from the sidelines, visibly relieved that the anxiety of being responsible for Grandpa’s welfare is over.
“The Stanley Hotel has been more than gracious,” he says. “They absolutely profusely thanked me…for being the glue that kept the thing together. And that’s enough for me.”
Shaffer stationed himself in the Stanley’s parking lot, not far from where his former client is now in proper cold storage, to sell his own merchandise and memorabilia. His homemade poster board propped in his open hatchback offered an alternative display to the museum’s slick informational posters.
MacDonald visited Frozen Dead Guy Days in 2024 “to do a little secret review,” she says. “I just wanted to see what it was like, because it was such my baby. And now I have nothing to do with it.”
Yet everyone seems to agree that Grandpa’s new accommodations are more dignified and sustainable than the setup in Nederland, even if visiting him now is a completely different experience.
“Definitely not as cool as walking into the shed,” MacDonald says.•
Greg Campbell is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, film and video producer, and nonfiction author. His books include The Road to Kosovo, Blood Diamonds (made into an Oscar-nominated film), Flawless, and Pot, Inc.
