THE DEAD NORWEGIAN IN THE STANLEY'S ICE HOUSE

OPENING FROM BUCK

Moe Pass has been a park ranger for a long time. He has seen things. Bears in dumpsters, tourists trying to pet elk, a man who once asked him whether the deer were animatronic. He is not easy to surprise.

 

He called me Tuesday and said, "Buck. Did you know there is a dead Norwegian in the Stanley Hotel's ice house?"

I told him I had heard something about that.

"He has been frozen since 1989," Moe said. "He is over a hundred and twenty years old. He is kept in liquid nitrogen. And there is an annual festival in his honor."

 

I told him to come over. The coffee was on and the story was going to take a while.

 

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PULL UP A CHAIR. THIS ONE'S GOOD.

 

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Who Is Grandpa Bredo?

Bredo Morstoel was born in Norway around 1900. He lived a quiet life. Retired parks director. Liked painting and fishing and walking in the mountains. Died of a heart condition in Oslo in 1989 at the age of eighty-nine.

 

Most stories end there. This one was just getting started.

 

Bredo had a grandson named Trygve Bauge who had moved from Norway to Colorado in 1980 carrying a deep conviction that frozen bodies could one day be reanimated by future science. When Bredo died, Trygve did not arrange a funeral. He shipped the body to a cryonics facility in San Leandro, California, where it stayed for nearly four years while the family figured out the next step.

 

The next step turned out to be Nederland, Colorado.

 

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How Did a Frozen Norwegian End Up in a Tuff Shed Above a Mountain Town?

Trygve had a vision. He wanted to build a private cryonics headquarters in Nederland, forty miles south of Estes Park, and bring his grandfather there permanently. He bought land. He started building what he described as an earthquake-proof, fireproof, bombproof cryonics facility made of cement, steel beams, and nearly fifty percent rebar. The structure is still standing today above the neighborhood, described by locals as an unmitigated eyesore in an otherwise quaint mountain town.

 

In 1993, Trygve moved Grandpa Bredo from California to Nederland. He placed him in a blue sleeping bag, inside a stainless steel sarcophagus, inside a handmade plywood-and-styrofoam crypt the size of a large hot tub, all stored in a flimsy tin shed on a windy hillside above town.

 

Then everything fell apart.

 

Trygve got deported back to Norway. Not because of the frozen grandfather. Because his visa had expired, triggered when authorities caught up with him over a poorly conceived joke about hijacking an airplane he had made back in 1986. A few days after he was put on a plane to Oslo, his mother Aud came down from the unfinished cement bunker and told a local reporter she was worried Grandpa would melt.

That is how the world found out.

 

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What Did the Nederland City Council Do?

 

The reporter called the Nederland city council.

The council passed an ordinance making it illegal to store frozen bodies in residential homes.

 

Then they grandfathered Bredo in. He had been there before the law existed, so he got to stay.

 

Only in Colorado.

 

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Who Kept Him Frozen for Thirty Years?

This is the part of the story that does not get told enough.

 

For three decades, two men kept Grandpa Bredo from thawing. The first was Bo "Iceman" Shaffer, who made ice runs to Denver every month in the early years, sometimes sneaking in and out of town because Bredo was not exactly welcome in certain corners of the community.

 

In 2013, a former healthcare worker named Brad Wickham took over. Brad drove to Denver every two weeks and hauled over half a ton of dry ice back up that hill, packing it onto the casket by hand. His biggest private fear was that the sheer weight of the ice, a thousand pounds loaded every two weeks for years, might have shattered the frozen body inside.

 

Neither man ever knew for certain what condition Bredo was in. The casket had not been opened since California.

 

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What Did They Find When They Finally Opened It?

In August 2023, Stanley Hotel owner John Cullen had flown to Norway to personally get the family's blessing to move Grandpa Bredo from the Tuff Shed to the Stanley. With permission granted, a team from Alcor Life Extension Foundation descended on the shed at 3:30 in the morning to avoid onlookers. They completed the extraction in ten minutes.

 

Then they opened the casket.

 

Bredo looked remarkable. His skin had a healthy pink hue from three decades on ice. The only visible damage was a slightly flattened nose, caused by the casket having been stored face-down in the early days. There is apparently a secret video of the unveiling. The people who have seen it do not say much about it, which probably means it is exactly as strange as you would expect.

 

Alcor's team drove Bredo from Nederland to Estes Park and placed him head-down in a ten-foot-tall silver steel dewar, essentially a giant thermos of liquid nitrogen, inside The Stanley Hotel's original 1909 ice house. Head-down keeps his brain in the coldest part of the chamber. Alcor scientists monitor him remotely.

 

Grandpa Bredo, who spent his life walking in Norwegian mountains, now lives at 333 East Wonderview Avenue, Estes Park, Colorado.

 

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Why the Stanley?

The 1909 ice house was originally built to store ice cut from the nearby pond to refrigerate the hotel's food and drink. It has sat mostly unused for decades.

 

Cullen, who loves a good story, pointed out the convergence nobody could have planned: The Stanley Hotel is the building that inspired Stephen King's The Shining. Jack Nicholson's character freezes to death in the hedge maze at the end of the film. The Stanley is now home to both fiction's and Colorado's most famous frozen dead guy.

 

Some things are too perfect to have been invented.

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What Happened to the Festival?

Frozen Dead Guy Days began in Nederland in 2002, created by the chamber of commerce to attract winter tourists. At its peak it drew 20,000 people to a mountain town of 1,500.

 

In the old Nederland days, festival-goers could bribe the caretaker into letting them crawl into the crypt and lie on the dry ice for a photo, often toasting Bredo with a shot of Old Grand-Dad whiskey chilled in the same ice.

 

In 2023, after the relationship between the festival organizers and the town of Nederland deteriorated, the whole operation relocated to Estes Park, following Grandpa Bredo's own move to the Stanley.

 

This year marks the third annual Frozen Dead Guy Days in Estes Park. The Estes version is a bit more polished than the Nederland days. Coffin races now involve teams of six racing an open coffin around an obstacle course while shooting hoops through a giant skull. There is a Royal Blue Ball costume gala at the Stanley. There is a Burrrlesque performance. And the polar plunge still happens, which means some people in this town have not yet learned their lesson.

 

Grandpa Bredo has been patient through all of it.

 

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Moe finished his coffee and sat quietly for a long moment.

"So he is actually here," he said. "Right now. In the Stanley's ice house."

"Has been since 2023," I said.

"I have walked past that building a hundred times," Moe said.

"Most people have," I said.

He put his cup down and looked toward the window. "You think he would have liked Estes Park?"

I told him most people do.