Behold the Frozen!
Frozen Dead Guy Days is hardly a secret anymore. In just 12 years they’ve managed to put this fest on the map. It’s been written up in magazines around the world, blogged about and even featured on national television (more than once).
Apparently, when you design a festival around a frozen dead guy, it’s a recipe for media attention.
If, for some reason, this festival is new to you, let me fill in the cold and gory details. There really is a dead guy in Nederland and he’s been frozen for 24 years. His name was Bredo Morstoel. He never lived in Colorado, in fact, he lived and died in Norway. However, he was a believer in cryonics, and after his death his body was shipped to a cryonics lab in California.
Remember cryonics? You don’t here about it much anymore, but it was the popular pseudo-scientific idea that if you kept a dead body frozen, you could somehow bring it back to life in the future when we figure out how to do that, or aliens land and show us how.
Apparently Grandpa Bredo, as the cold corpse is called, had family who also believed in cryogenics. They lived in Colorado, so that’s how Grandpa found his way to a shed on a hill in Nederland. His relatives are long gone, but when the media got wind of this unique situation, Grandpa Bredo became sensational news, and has been cared for ever since, and by cared for I mean a group of individuals deliver ice to his shed monthly keeping his body ready for his future resurrection.
Sound a bit weird? Welcome to Nederland. The tiny town embraces weird like a long lost child, and they let their freak flag fly extra high during Frozen Dead Guy Days.
The festival features an array of off the wall events like the frozen t-shirt contest, coffin races, a hearse parade, ice turkey bowling, frozen salmon toss, snowy beach volleyball, polar plunging and more. I’m not making this up – who could?
The popularity of the festival brings a lot of people to the tiny town of Nederland, so be prepared for crowds and leave the kids and baby strollers at home. Located an hour from Denver, the festival organizers encourage people to take the RTD N bus from Boulder to the event.
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Actually, Grandpa Bredo was not a fan of cryonics, his grandson Trygve was the mover and shaker behind freezing Grandpa and shipping him to California and then to Nederland, Colorado. Folks can learn the true story by watching the documentary “Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed.”
The screenings will take place all day Saturday and Sunday in the bar at the Black Forest Restaurant. We’ll alternate the documentary with a few clips of cryonics (or cryogenics) from Hollywood movies.
I’ll also be conducting The Newly-Dead Game twice on Saturday and once on Sunday. Here’s more info about the game, which debuted at Frozen Dead Guy Days in 2011: http://agoodgoodbye.com/to-die-for-shopping/the-newly-dead-game/
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Gail,
Thank you so much for stopping by and enlightening us on this subject. Perhaps I misinterpreted the story on the Dead Guy Days website, but I happily stand corrected.
I hope people will stop by the Black Forest Restaurant during the event and get the real story!!!
Newly-Dead Game… sounds delightful. LOL!!!
~Heidi, The Mayor
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Actually, “Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed” (not to be confused with “Grandpa’s Still in the Tuff Shed”, which was just a re-hash with a lot of extraneous crap added to enable selling another “movie”) was full of inaccuracies, even though it was the movie that launched the BIFF so many years ago. If you want the *real* stories….you’ll have to read “Colorado’s Iceman and the Story of the Frozen Dead Guy”. THAT has the straight poop….
Looking forward to the Newly Dead Games…8)
Bo the Iceman
PS…Cryonics refers to the preservation of humans by cryogenic means. Cryogenic means generating cryo-temps. Usually in the range of -100 to -200 F.
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That’s awesome info! Thanks for stopping by town and thanks for sharing this!!!