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Frozen Dead Guy Days, one of Colorado’s most beloved annual events for more than 20 years, is kicking off a new chapter in Estes Park. Taking place over St. Patrick’s Day weekend on March 17-19, 2023, the reborn Frozen Dead Guy Days will feature live music and entertainment all weekend long, and will be held at the Estes Park Events Complex and The Stanley Hotel, with satellite events occurring around town.
Festival goers can expect the weird and wonderful happenings from years past, including coffin races and a polar plunge, as well as plenty of new and elevated Estes twists, like a frostbite fashion show, roaming freak show acts, a Bands and Bloody Sunday Brunch and more.
According to Wikipedia, here's the history and how it all started.
In 1989, a Norwegian citizen named Trygve Bauge brought the corpse of his recently deceased grandfather, Bredo Morstøl, to the United States.[1] The body was preserved on dry ice for the trip, and stored in liquid nitrogen at the Trans Time cryonics facility in San Leandro, California from 1990 to 1993.[1]
In 1993, Bredo was returned to dry ice and transported to the town of Nederland, where Trygve and his mother Aud planned to create a cryonics facility of their own. When Trygve was deported from the United States for overstaying his visa, his mother, Aud, continued keeping her father's body cryogenically frozen in a shack behind her unfinished house.[1]
Aud was eventually evicted from her home for living in a house with no electricity or plumbing, in violation of local ordinances.[1] At that time, she told a local reporter about her father's body, and those of two other individuals, and the reporter went to the local city hall in order to let them know about Aud's fears that her eviction would cause her father's body to thaw out.
According to an article in the February 7, 1995, The Denver Post, Aud Morstoel was found guilty by a jury of building-use and zoning violations. The Nederland town judge ordered her to remove the frozen body of her father from Nederland by March 6 or face 10 days in jail and a $600.00 fine.
The story caused a sensation. In response, the city added a broad new provision to Section 7-34 of its Municipal Code, "Keeping of bodies", outlawing the keeping of "the whole or any part of the person, body or carcass of a human being or animal or other biological species which is not alive upon any property". However, because of the publicity that had arisen, they made an exception for Bredo, a grandfather clause. Trygve secured the services of Delta Tech, a local environmental company, to keep the cryonic facility running. Bo Shaffer, CEO of Delta Tech, was known locally as "The Iceman" and caretaker responsible for transporting the dry ice necessary for cryopreservation to the IC Institute,[2] something he has done since 1995.[1][3] In that year, the local Tuff Shed supplier and a Denver radio station built a new shed in which to store the body of Bredo.[1] In the fall of 2012, Jane Curtis Gazit and Mike Wooten, took over as Bredo's caretakers, but they passed caretaking duties to Brad Wickham, a resident of Nederland, who is the current caretaker.
In honor of the town's unique resident, Nederland holds an annual celebration, first started in 2002.[1]
Photo: AFP