Frozen Dead Guy Festival

People in Colorado party around a cryogenically frozen dead Norwegian known as Grandpa in one of the world’s weirdest festivals. The people in the small town of Nederland, Colorado spend a weekend each year celebrating Frozen Dead Guy Days. In 1989, Bredo Morstoel, a former landscape architect died in Norway and his grandson, Trygve Bauge had the body flown to the U.S., preserved, and stored in liquid nitrogen. Four years later, Bauge and his mother, Aud Morstoel brought the body to their home in Nederland, about 45 miles from Denver where they stored it in a garden shed. Their hope was to build a cryogenics laboratory to bring Bredo back to life in what they hoped would be the medically advanced future.

That plan didn’t happen.

It wasn’t long before the town of Nederland was on to the dead guy in the garden shed. They passed a law prohibiting the storage of frozen people within city limits, but they could not make the ban retrospective. So Bredo Morstoel remainedcooling his heels in the garden shed until the garden shed began to fall down. That’s when the frozen Bredo Morstoel became the center of civic pride, and the town adopted the body. A local storage company donated a new shed and a Denver radio station raised the 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 look-a-like 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.

Curse of the BIlly Goat Tavern

The Curse of the Billy Goat has its its roots in the 1945 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Detroit Tigers. According to the legend, William Sianis a Greek immigrant took his pet goat, Murphy to the Series, but instead of sitting in their seats, Sianis and the goat walked out on to the playing field to garner publicity for Siani’s tavern that was across the street. It didn’t take long before both man and goat were escorted off by ushers. The pair returned to their seats, but orders came down from the Cub’s owner, Philip Knight Wrigley to eject Sianis because the “goat smelled bad.” After Wrigley insulted the goat Sianis placed a curse on the team, saying that the Cubs would never win another pennant or play in another World Series at Wrigley Field. The Cubs eventually lost the 1945 World Series and have not been back to the championship series since. Sianis’ nephew has paraded a goat around the field a few times in an attempt to break the curse without any luck.

The Billy Goat Tavern was immortalized on Saturday Night Live when John Belushi and Bill Murray developed a skit that centered around the tavern’s menu and hasty ordering system. The “Cheeseburger!Cheeseburger! Pepsi! No Coke!” routine put the tavern on the map, making it a favorite of tourists visiting the windy city.

John Belushi was a comedic genius who got his start in the Second City Troupe in Chicago. His big break came when he was cast in National Lampoon’s Lemmings in 1972, he then went on to SNL and fame. Belushi was only 33 when he died, his tombstone reads, “I may be gone, but Rock ‘n Roll lives on.

Haunted Television

Stories of souls trapped or lost in television’s nowhere land permeated the folklore of the Sputnik Era. In 1953 the NY Times carried an article about a Long Island family with a TV set inhabited by the ghost of a mysterious woman. Jerome Travers and his 3 children reported seeing the woman during Ding Dong School.The Travers family was besieged by reporters, but the image never reappeared

 

In the 1960’s a Wisconsin woman claimed to have seen a couple arguing on a balcony and the call letters of a defunct radio station on her television screen. The vision was followed by a desperate cry for help. Rosella Rose was not the first person to see the KLEE station card almost twelve year after it was abandoned, and when news of her sighting appeared in the papers it reinforced public perception that television was a netherworld where even the most fleeting earthly message could be trapped.

Reports of electronic transmissions between the real and the spirit world in the early days of television were generated by public anxiety surrounding the new technology. For a viewing public unfamiliar with ideas like electromagnetic waves, static, and cathode ray tubes, a host of suspicions arose including the belief that a television set was capable of transporting individuals to another dimension, holding them captive in some sort of electronic limbo, and if conditions were right, becoming remote viewers for surveillance.

These paranoia made rich fodder for a host of science fiction plots on popular television series like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. Early television reception was also full of electronic deficiencies like double images, phantom transmissions, and sound distortions that gave rise to a host of sightings. Scholars have linked these sightings to quickly changing social realities that fueled public distrust. The cultural implications of ghost sightings at the dawn of the television age have been written about at length by social historians in books like Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraph to Television and The Revolution Wasn’t Televised. Public reaction today to a ghost in the machine is quite different as evidenced by the reaction of the giggling group in the YOUTube video showing above. Due to constant exposure to the video stream our reactions are now mitigated by both experience with the technology and our sophistication with the meaning and limitations of media.