Colorado town's Frozen Dead Guy Days festival salutes chilly corpse

Frozen Dead Guy Days festival in Colorado pays homage to Bredo Morstoel who is preserved in dry ice in a shed. (Boulder Daily Camera)

A cryogenically frozen Norwegian grandfather is the inspiration for an oddball three-day weekend party in a small Colorado town.

The Frozen Dead Guy Days festival takes place in Nederland and the star of the show is Bredo Morstoel who has been dead since 1989, according to The Boulder Daily Camera. The event kicks off Friday.

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Morstoel was moved to Nederland in 1993 after soaking in liquid nitrogen for years in California. His wife and son moved to the town of 1,500 near Boulder to start a cryonics facility but then that’s when things got weird, according to the paper.

Aud Morstoel went into town one day to fight an eviction and told a reporter that she was housing a dead body.

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“The police drove up there and, in 1994, the story broke nationally that Nederland had a frozen, dead grandpa in town,” the festival’s Teresa Crush-Warren told the paper. “Since then, the family has been paying someone to keep Grandpa on ice.”

A coffin race team that participated in last year's Frozen Dead Guy Days festival in Colorado. (Jeremy Papasso/ Boulder Daily Camera)

Caretaker Brad Wickham hauls 2,400 pounds of dry ice a month to a hilltop shed where Morstoel’s body is being preserved in a metal container. Morstoel’s wife and grandson were deported on a visa violation.

Nederland’s  town code was amended to prohibit dead bodies on any property, but Morstoel was exempted under a grandfather clause, the paper reported.

“To this day, there’s still an ordinance in Nederland that we can’t have frozen bodies,” Crush-Warren said.

The festival sponsors a coffin race, a costumed ball, bowling with frozen fowl, and a polar plunge.

New this year is a Rise from the Dead Fat bike race.