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Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave, pretending like she's Dave. She does that a lot. And this is Short Stuff.
That's right.
SPEAKER_06:
About a frozen body.
SPEAKER_02:
That's right. Exactly. There is no way we could do this without that. So thank you for clearing it up right out of the gate.
SPEAKER_06: I feel like we talked about this festival at some point on maybe it was one of our videos or something.
SPEAKER_02: We did an episode on strange festivals. So I'm sure we mentioned this, but I don't remember the story behind it. I made the same frozen body joke.
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_02: Let's get into it. You can't not. I think that's the town motto.
SPEAKER_06: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02: So we're talking about a frozen body of a man who in life was called Bredo Morstool. And he was from Norway.
And when 1989 rolled around, he was a ripe 89 years old. He'd been living in Norway outside of Oslo for basically his whole life. And his life had been kind of unremarkable. Apparently he designed city parks, which is a pretty cool job, but like he hadn't set the world on fire. And I don't really think he cared about that from what I understand. Although I don't personally know because I don't know him, but suffice to say that when he died in Norway in 1989, it did not make international news. How about that?
SPEAKER_06: Okay. He had a grandson and I have no idea how to pronounce this. Trigvi.
SPEAKER_06: I'm not big on my Norwegian.
SPEAKER_02: It's really Trigvi.
Okay.
SPEAKER_06: And he was really into cryonics and preserving bodies. And this was in 1989 when that wasn't,
and it's still not the most common thing, but it's certainly gained a lot more popularity
SPEAKER_02: in recent years.
SPEAKER_06: But in 89, he was kind of a groundbreaking guy
to try to do something like this on his own.
And that is try to do this on his own and say,
hey, granddad, I think we want to preserve you.
And so I am going to build a cryonic facility myself. Eventually I'd like it to be a business, but at least want to get you going because the clock is ticking.
SPEAKER_02: Right. And his grandfather didn't respond because he was dead.
But Trigvi went ahead with the plans anyway. He had Bredo shipped from Oslo to Oakland. That, you know, typical route that a dead body follows after you expire. And the reason he ended up in Oakland, California, is because there was an established cryonic facility there called Trans Time. And for three years, that's where Bredo's first final resting place was. He was immersed in liquid nitrogen and kept in an extraordinarily cold temperature to preserve him. Because that's the point. I mean, we did a whole cryonics episode, if I'm not mistaken. But this is a brief refresher. The point of cryonics is to preserve the living tissue to the degree that if we ever figure out how to reanimate dead people, you will be intact when they revive you, these doctors of the future. That's the key. And that's what Trigvi wanted to do with his grandfather, Bredo.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. And if you look up one of these facilities today, they'll say, great, you want just the head or the whole body? Yeah. Which is very interesting. So, which is, speaking of Matt Groening, that's also sort of a Futurama reference. Totally. Like Nixon?
SPEAKER_06: That's right.
And as a reminder, I saw a head in a bucket once. People are talking about that still.
SPEAKER_02: That is so crazy.
SPEAKER_06: So, over the course of a few years, he got the help of his mom, Aud, and said, all right, I'm building this thing out in Colorado, as it turns out, a place called Nederland. And it was a legal thing to do at first, but then he applied for a permit and they said, nah, you can't do that. And he said, well, I'm just going to keep doing it anyway, illegally. And in 1993, so this is four-ish years after his granddad had died, they said, all right, I think we're okay. We can move him from Oakland into our own sort of home setup in Nederland, Colorado.
SPEAKER_02: It was a decided step down for Bredo. Yeah. He went from the high life immersed in liquid nitrogen to a makeshift wooden freezer surrounded by foam rubber and dry ice blocks.
SPEAKER_02: But apparently it worked. It was good enough for Tryggve and Aud, his mom. And so that's where Bredo set up starting in 93. They also decided that they were going to build a structure that could not only keep a cryonic body indefinitely, the structure itself would survive indefinitely. So they built a concrete structure, they build it out with studs, and then they stopped there. And one of the reasons they stopped was because suddenly all of this stuff came to the attention of the outside authorities. And I say we take a break on that and come back and tell the rest of this crazy, crazy story.
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SPEAKER_02: So in 1993, Tigvey's in his new house in a wooden structure out back. Apparently, he was in a blue REI sleeping bag, zipped up, surrounded by foam, foam rubber, all that, and then outside of all that were the bricks of dry ice. And I guess, Tigvey, for future handiness, labeled which end of the sleeping bag was the head, but was later found to have gotten it wrong, which is kind of funny. And they kept it at, I think, a negative 110 degrees Celsius, which is pretty, pretty cold, but from what I read, still inadequate for cryonics. But they kept in that way anyway, and every two weeks they would have to put new dry ice blocks around them. And they kept doing that and were planning on doing that indefinitely. And about that time, immigration officials slipped into this whole fray.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the irony of this whole thing is they were,
I guess, from the naked eye, what they thought were preserving him.
But they weren't preserving him good enough to ever bring him back to life, if that were to ever be a thing.
SPEAKER_02: That's my understanding of it, yeah.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So immigration said, I'm sorry, your visa has run out. You have to leave the country.
So, Tigvey left in 1994 and said, Mom, you got to take care of your dad there.
I'm leaving. You got to switch this dry ice out every two weeks and keep that temperature down.
And mom was like, all right, I got it. And the news got out a little bit. Needle Inn wasn't the biggest place. It probably still isn't the biggest town. And I get the feeling that Tigvey was sort of an eccentric there. Yeah, he started the local polar bear plunge tradition.
SPEAKER_02:
Awesome. That's fun.
SPEAKER_06: So when he got deported, there were, you know, there were interviews being done by the local alternative weekly. And they got in touch with mom during this interview. She, I get the feeling, sort of accidentally said out loud, like, I wonder what's going
to happen with dad's remains now.
And then the word was out that there was a frozen dead guy in the town.
And eventually that would become a festival called Frozen Dead Guy Days.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because very quickly this story got out of Colorado and went around the world. And Nedderlin decided, hey, we could capitalize on this. Like, yes, this is a really weird story. And people think we're weirdos for having a guy who had his dead grandfather frozen out back. But let's do something with that. And the Chamber of Commerce came up with Frozen Dead Guy Days starting in 2002, which is,
you know, definitely making lemonade out of lemons, I guess you could say. But in the meantime, there was still the matter of what to do with Braido right after it was found out that Braido was out back. And not only Braido, by the way, Trigvy had gotten his first paying customer. So Braido and a man named Al Campbell shared that makeshift freezer for a little while. But the Nedderlin town council said, we actually, like, we've got something on the books, right? Like, this is illegal.
What they had in fact in there was that Trigvy was a dyed in the wool libertarian, the kind of guy who would raise holy heck for arbitrary, you know, movements or decisions by the government. And he forced that, no, it was not very clear what the town's position on keeping a frozen dead body of a relative out back in your house was. And so Braido got grandfathered in even after the town passed a new ordinance saying, like, you can't do that anymore. No pun intended.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, grandfathered in? Yeah, it really wasn't, is the sad thing.
SPEAKER_06: So he's there still, he's allowed to stay. And so all of a sudden, he needs a little help taking care of grandpa. He puts out an ad and says, I need someone to help me take care.
SPEAKER_06: You have to like change out this dry ice, check on them, that kind of thing. And a guy named Beau Shaffer said, I'll do it. And so for, and not only will I do it, he did it for 30 years. He looked over this guy that wasn't even his grandpa, bringing in that fresh dry ice, packing them every two weeks, making sure he was okay and checking in on him. And I think it's pretty remarkable. Eventually, that shed needed some work because of a blizzard. And the local rock radio station got involved. And of course, you know, like local rock radio does, they find some kind of weird thing to get behind for some press. And they ended up getting Tough Sheds, the company, which is great, by the way, big fan of Tough Sheds. Oh, yeah?
SPEAKER_06:
Oh, yeah, I've got one. They're awesome.
SPEAKER_06: And they're awesome because they donated this shed free of charge, also good press for them. And of course, the radio station painted their logo and stuff on the side of it. So now this guy... Wait, wait, wait, not just what their logo was.
SPEAKER_02: You have to say the words that they also painted on this structure.
SPEAKER_06: Well, I think that was their thing. They were classic rock.
SPEAKER_02: They painted classic rock on the shed that held Bredo's frozen corpse.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah, they had to take advantage of it. So from that point on, it was not much of a story. I mean, they had their frozen dead guys festival. Bredo was still there. And in 2020, I imagine because of COVID, the town chamber of commerce went bankrupt. The town kind of fell on harder times. And they sold the rights to that festival to a private entity. And everyone was like, this thing stinks now. It's just not the same as it used to be.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it got moved to Estes Park, which is a little ways away. It just lost the edginess of it. It wasn't rough around the edges anymore. And it lost its spirit according to the people who liked the original version. That was one thing that changed. Another thing that changed around that time is that Trigby started looking for a third final resting place for his grandfather, Bredo. And in August of 2023, the town of Nederland found out that their famous frozen dead guy, Bredo, had been moved to Estes Park like frozen dead guy days had been to the Stanley Hotel.
SPEAKER_06: That Stanley Hotel, the same one that inspired The Shining when Stephen King and his family
vacation there.
SPEAKER_06: So if you ever hear anyone say, you know what the Stanley Hotel is known for, right?
Just kind of throw them off base and say, yeah, they have a cryonics museum and a frozen dead grandpa.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's where Bredo is. He's in an exhibit sponsored by Alcor, one of the leading cryonics companies. And who knows where his next final resting place will be, but that's where you can find him now.
SPEAKER_06: I hope this is it, but I have a feeling it won't be.
SPEAKER_02: No way. Not in an exhibit at the Stanley Hotel. He's going to end up somewhere else. And I, for one, can't wait to see where it is.
SPEAKER_06: I wonder if we should raise some money and see if we can take custody.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like KRFX 103.5, the Fox. That's how we'll do it. That's how we'll do it. We're going to paint classic rock and S-Y-S-K on whatever we built for him too. I love it.
SPEAKER_02: Well, Chuck said, I love it. You can't really end on a better note than that. So short stuff is out.
SPEAKER_00:
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