The new life of Colorado's Frozen Dead Guy: A curious tale grows larger

ESTES PARK • Last April, Stanley Hotel owner John Cullen found himself on a 14-hour flight to Norway to discuss the acquisition of a man’s dead, frozen grandfather.

“What the hell am I doing?” he recalled asking himself.

He recalled another thought: “Thank God I don’t have a boss.”

A boss probably would not have allowed Cullen to previously buy Colorado’s most famously bizarre festival, Frozen Dead Guy Days, and move it from Nederland to Estes Park. And a boss probably would not have allowed Cullen to pursue the famously morbid mascot for that festival: Bredo Morstøl.

The Norwegian died in 1989 and was laid to rest in a frozen tomb in Nederland as part of his grandson’s cryonics dream. Tygve Bauge’s dream was scuttled by agents who deported him in 1994, the stranger-than-fiction story goes. The story gets stranger: With the discovery of Morstøl, Nederland caretakers emerged to continue packing him with dry ice inside a hilltop shed while Frozen Dead Guy Days raged like a wintertime Burning Man in town.

Grandpa Bredo, as the frozen dead guy became known, remained in the shed until last year.

Cullen’s appeal to Bauge was successful — ahead of legal and logistical wrangling, curious conversations and revelations regarding life and death, and a “rescue mission” said to involve former Navy SEALs. It all takes the frozen dead guy story to even stranger heights.

“Basically,” Cullen said, “in order to save the festival, I had to buy the festival and move it here. And in order to save it again and keep it, I had to get Bredo in the house.”

Grandpa Bredo is home in the Stanley Hotel’s historic ice house. This is now the International Cryonics Museum — the latest attraction at Cullen’s proud, storied destination.

The Stanley again will host costumed dancers of the Blue Ball when Frozen Dead Guy Days makes its second return to Estes Park this month. Now there’s a new tour at the hotel, to go with tours dedicated to history and ghosts and the setting that inspired Stephen King’s “The Shining.”

There’s a tour to Grandpa Bredo, who rests in a 12-foot- tall steel tank filled with liquid nitrogen and set to -320 degrees. The double-walled, vacuum-sealed vat displays the name Alcor. That’s the Arizona-based leader of the industry that for 50 years has inspired intrigue and outrage over the idea that the frozen dead might one day return.

Cryonics is defined by one panel on the museum walls: “the practice of preserving life by pausing the dying process using subfreezing temperatures with the intent of restoring good health with medical technology in the future.”

A few of Alcor’s reported 225 “patients” cryopreserved at its Scottsdale base are quoted, including Hal Finney, the noted software developer, and the accomplished writer Arthur Naiman. There’s no mention of baseball legend Ted Williams, the most famous name linked to Alcor.

The organization does not generally reveal names, but it’s clear Grandpa Bredo is far from the most famous. He is, though, the first body Alcor agreed to remotely watch from Scottsdale monitors.

The grandson, Bauge, “jumped on the opportunity,” he said in an email from Norway. Alcor, he said, represented another step in his goal with Grandpa: “to work towards having him cloned, once that becomes technically possible, legal and affordable.”

Brad Wickham is also glad about the move.

Wickham is the one who took care of Grandpa Bredo the past decade in Nederland. Bauge wired money for the dry ice and other troubles.

But Wickham described trouble mounting over time — mental and physical anguish from years of hauling 1,000 pounds of dry ice from a Denver plant up to Grandpa Bredo’s shed. It was sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes against snow that piled high on the hill, “holidays away from family and whatever,” Wickham said. There was a “persistence” to Bauge, Wickham said.

As to why Wickham persisted, “I’ve thought about it for so long, and I still can’t really tell you,” he said. “... I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve got a little therapy going on here to resolve some of this stuff.”

It’s another part of the strange story.

Fit for ‘The Shining’

For Cullen, the story starts at an Estes Park brewery in the fall of 2022.

He was visiting with friends, among them one from Nederland, who explained the little town’s decision to kill Frozen Dead Guy Days due to years of degradation and an obvious lack of hotels, restaurants and other resources. Nederland was no place for thousands of partiers.

“By the third beer, I sorta swished the beer around and looked at my friends and went, ‘Huh,’” Cullen said. “And they go, ‘Oh, Christ, we’ve seen that look before.’”

With plenty of hotels beyond his most iconic one, with plenty of space and economic need in March’s tourist lull, Estes Park could be the place for the festival, Cullen thought.

And it could perfectly play into the vision Cullen had for the Stanley’s future, tied to “The Shining” connection he has promoted over his 29 years of ownership. In an arrangement recently announced, the hotel is to house the Stanley Film Center, to be an extension of the biggest name in horror: Blumhouse Productions.

After acquiring the festival, Cullen sought to turn management over to the local tourism bureau.

“I immediately threw my support behind him,” Visit Estes Park CEO Kara Franker said, “because I knew it would provide a boost to the local economy in the winter and during a time when we need more visitors.”

Mission accomplished. Franker said last year’s festival drew more than 6,000 people for the weekend, spelling a 4.15% year-to-year increase in sales tax revenues. It’s thanks to Cullen — “a visionary,” Franker called him.

The Stanley’s run of bankruptcy ended after Cullen bought it for $3.1 million in 1995. It would join the portfolio of luxury hotels under his Grand Heritage Hotel Group.

“Owned and managed 51 hotels in 17 countries,” Cullen said. “This is the only one I kept.”

The reason is obvious, he said: “The content and curation of the Stanley is tons of fun.”

By that he means the storytelling — the very marketable aspects of a historic hotel with a haunted reputation, with claim to the scenic, mountainous source for a Stephen King classic.

Anyone who knows Cullen knows him as someone who makes things happen. Money helps. But he credits storytelling most of all: “I’ve been a problem solver, and I’ve used story as my primary weapon in fighting those fights.”

Conveniently, the internet was coming along just as Cullen bought the Stanley. “Where not only I could tell the story, but people could tell their story of our story,” he said.

Along came the next great story, that of the frozen dead guy, and the chance to secure him.

“What’s the last scene in ‘The Shining’?” Cullen said. “A frozen dead guy!”

A ‘rescue mission’

The conversation was long, the detours many — topics ranging from cloning to a post-nuclear society — but Cullen came to an agreement with Bauge, the grandson.

Grandpa Bredo’s transfer to Alcor would be legal through the Anatomical Gift Act, and leasing the Stanley’s ice house to the nonprofit would solve a zoning issue, sides determined. But how to transfer the body from Nederland to Estes Park?

The “rescue mission” is pictured at the museum: a team gathered at Grandpa Bredo’s former shed, in red shirts reading “DART: Deployment and Recovery Team.”

DART was an idea of James Arrowood’s when he came into Alcor leadership.

When a cryopreservation-seeking person dies, “time to temperature is super critical,” explained Arrowood, Alcor’s co-CEO and president. “As soon as somebody dies, you need to do a highly specialized process very quickly, and you need people to do that at the highest level.”

He thought of Navy SEALs. “I had a lot of those people in my rolodex,” he said.

Arrowood had built contacts over his niche career as an attorney specializing in emerging military technology and pharmaceuticals.

“If it was weird, if another attorney didn’t know how to conceive of it or deal with it, I’m the guy everybody would end up calling,” he said.

That’s how he came to Alcor. He came to understand the kind of people involved — the kind willing to devote life insurance or pay cash sums between $80,000 and $200,000. That’s Alcor’s charge for cryopreserving a brain or full body. (Many opt for just the brain, including Alcor’s former president, who told The New York Times a few years ago: “That is where my personality lives and my memories are ... all the rest is replaceable.”)

Beyond the preservation costs, more than half of the nonprofit’s funding comes from donations, Arrowood said. “Incredibly wealthy tech people and high-end people who are confidential,” he said.

Along with the 225 cryopreserved “patients,” Alcor reports 1,424 people have committed their brains or bodies to what is only promised to be a science experiment. Alcor claims the best methods and technology understood while advancing knowledge toward the goal that, to date, has only been realized by Han Solo and science-fiction counterparts.

Arrowood might have thought cryonics weird at one time. Then he looked around at what he said “were literally some of the smartest scientists on Earth and some of the smartest technology people on Earth.”

He said he came to think like some of them: “Worst case I’m donating my body to science and I know what it’s being used for. ... Absolute best-case scenario, you win the powerball and you come back and you’re with some of the most interesting people ever.”

Cullen wondered about the people inside the steel cylinders as he walked among them during an Alcor tour.

“Very little has spooked or scared me in my almost three decades at the Stanley,” he said. “But I gotta tell you, I walked in that storage room down in Arizona, and the hair on my arm raised.”

The Alcor story

The cryonics industry gained new interest during the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented time for contemplating mortality and browsing the internet.

Along with more facilities spotting America, Russia, Berlin and Australia, MIT Technology Review in 2022 chronicled what it called “China’s first forays into cryonics.” The lab in the eastern Jinan province “signals something of a new era for cryonics,” the publication wrote, adding:

“With impressive financial resources, government support and scientific staff, it’s one of a handful of new labs focused on expanding the consumer appeal of cryonics and trying anew to bring credibility to the long-disputed theory of human reanimation.”

The disputes have stayed the same since Alcor’s founding in 1972 by Fred Chamberlain.

He was a NASA engineer who knew deep space travel to be impossible for the body that would die over warped time — unless, he suspected, the body could be cryopreserved. Chamberlain was among followers of Robert Ettinger, “the Father of Cryonics,” who in 1962 published his book, “The Prospect of Immortality.”

The prospect was dismissed then as it is today by scientists who see the pursuit of reanimation as pseudoscience or something worse. “Fraud” was the word once used to describe the field by the Society of Cryobiology, which has more lately described it as “an act of speculation or hope, not science.”

Opponents deem cryonics fit for movies and media, not for academia.

Though, a paper in 2008 by the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute aimed to justify the field, stating first: “Very low temperatures create conditions that can preserve tissue for centuries, possibly including the neurological basis of the human mind.”

Cryonics is commonly dismissed on grounds of faith and philosophy, on matters of the soul rather than the brain.

Proponents might counter with concepts like artificial intelligence and gene editing now taking off. They might point to another recent development: A team of international scientists last year claimed reviving a worm locked 46,000 years in Siberian permafrost. Or they might reach back further to in vitro fertilization.

“Look,” Arrowood said, “emerging technology is science fiction until it’s not.”

Turning the page

Alcor carefully guards its story. Which explains Arrowood’s hesitancy over Colorado’s frozen dead guy and the accompanying hoopla. “I was like, no way,” Arrowood said.

Then came Cullen, ever convincing, set on his story at the Stanley. “This is the right place for Grandpa Bredo.”

He pledged financing (“substantial”). He pledged an engineering team and 24-hour security. And in the museum, he pledged the “professionalism” Alcor sought.

It’s Alcor’s story of cryonics — “firmly grounded in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine,” reads one display.

And there’s the one about DART: The team of “retired military special forces and other expert first responders with training in medical evacuations took less than 10 minutes to remove Bredo Morstøl’s body from his icy Tuff Shed tomb.”

It was impressive to see, said the man who’d been tending to the body all these years.

Wickham, 66, said he had never seen Grandpa’s face until then, covered until that fast inspection.

“He looked pretty good,” Wickham said. “He looked like he could sit up and maybe talk.”

The DART team commended Wickham. It felt like “closure,” Wickham said. “Knowing I was doing what I was supposed to do.”

He was doing it for reasons he still struggles to explain.

Maybe it had to do with what brought him to Nederland’s mountains in the first place: “to get away from addiction,” he said. The additional job “was something that kind of kept me focused and centered,” he said.

Maybe it had to do with the media attention. He initially enjoyed it, leading those reporters up to the shed, feeling like the star of Frozen Dead Guy Days.

“But it was soon overshadowed by the volume and weight of the responsibility,” Wickham said.

In an email from Norway, Bauge said: “I communicated with Brad on every single dry ice run over the 12 years he added dry ice. ... And I double checked every single dry ice run. He sent me pictures of dry ice receipts and of dry ice levels before and after each time dry ice was added. So I am very well aware of the challenges involved.”

The challenges would have been his alone, Bauge said, “if the United States had practiced the Jeffersonian liberty it was founded on.” Deportation split him from his grandpa, with whom he recalled “lots of vacations, ski trips, hikes in the mountains, fishing trips, etc.”

Bauge said he lived with the man for a while. “In Grandpa’s book shelf I even found a large article about cryonics. Something I already was interested in at the time.”

However “weird” his science sounded to Wickham, it seemed clear that Bauge very much loved and missed his grandpa. Wickham took that to heart.

And so he carried on, even as he was living away from Nederland in recent years. He still drove the heavy loads of dry ice from Denver through the mountains and up the hill. Sometimes, when his wheels couldn’t get through the snow, he’d carry the load up himself. Sometimes he had to dig his way in. Sometimes he feared getting stuck up there in a tomb beside Grandpa’s.

“I sometimes had nightmares about a way out,” he said.

The way out was the International Cryonics Museum.

“The one thing that helps me is knowing the story ended on the high note that it did,” Wickham said.

Frozen Dead Guy Days felt like “a hassle” to him over the years, what with all those media tours. But he went to Estes Park last year, and he thinks he’ll go again this year.

Because now he can just get lost in the crazy crowd. Now he doesn’t have those media responsibilities. He’s done telling that story.