People in Colorado party around a cryogenically frozen dead Norwegian known as Grandpa in what is one of the world’s weirdest festivals. The people in the small town of Nederland near the city of Denver spend a weekend celebrating Frozen Dead Guy Days. In 1989, Bredo Morstoel, a former landscape architect died in Norway and his grandson Trygve Bauge paid to have the body flown to California, preserved and stored in liquid nitrogen. Four years later, Bauge and his mother Aud Morstoel brought the body to their home in Nederland, 45 miles from Denver and put it on ice in a garden shed. Their hope was to build a cryogenics laboratory to bring him back to life in the medically advanced future.
When Nederland passed a law to prohibit the storage of frozen people within city limits, they could not make this ban retrospective. So the body was adopted by the town, while his relatives left America. Since then the town adopted the body in a very strange way.When the shed was just about to fall down, a local storage company donated a replacement and a Denver radio station raised money to maintain it.
The town now re-enacts the whole saga with its Frozen Dead Guy Days festival, complete with coffin races, snow sculpting and a grandpa Bredo lookalike contest. There’s even a Champagne tour of the new shed with the body is kept, a rib-eating contest and a “Thaw Your Bones” chili cook-off.
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