Family battles to visit 'frozen dead guy' Bizarre US celebration

Sunday Herald, The, Mar 6, 2005 by Senay Boztas Arts Correspondent

IT is a chilling story. As the people of Colorado party around a cryogenically frozen Norwegian known as Grandpa, his daughter and grandson are struggling to get American visas to pay their eternal respects.

In what must be one of the world's oddest festivals, a small mining town called Nederland, near the city of Denver, will spend next weekend celebrating its fourth Frozen Dead Guy Days, an annual winter extravaganza.

The body and (arguably) soul of the festival is Bredo Morstoel, who died in 1989.

Aged 89, his heart finally gave out. But death didn't finish off his influence over the living.

Instead, an extraordinary chain of events has seen him become a major tourist attraction yet left his blood relatives fighting to see their grandfather again.

When the former landscape architect died in Norway, his enterprising grandson Trygve Bauge - who had lived in Colorado's Boulder area from 1980 - paid dollars-50,000 (pounds-26,000) to have the body flown to California, preserved and stored in liquid nitrogen.

Four years later, Bauge and his mother Aud Morstoel brought the body to their home in Nederland, 35 miles northwest of Denver, in the hope of building a cryogenics laboratory to bring him back to life in the medically advanced future. The Rocky Mountain Cryonics Facility had another paying guest, Al Campbell of Chicago, whose friend paid several hundred dollars a month to keep him frozen next to grandpa Bredo.

But their hopes melted in 1994, when Immigration and Naturalisation Service officials knocked on the door to discover that Bauge no longer had a valid visa. The frozen men - kept at - 60C in an adapted tin garden shed packed fortnightly with 800lb (363kg) of dry ice - were only discovered when Morstoel asked what would happen to "the bodies".

Bauge returned to Norway and paid "up to dollars-7400 (pounds- 3848)" a year for a former Nederland neighbour and latterly a professional company to deliver ice fortnightly to keep his grandfather solid. Campbell was flown back to Chicago and buried at the request of his family.

But while Bauge's sister Anne requested that grandpa Bredo's body return to Norway, and with the town council keen to have the corpse elsewhere, the family were afraid that moving the body would thaw it - destroying their hopes of resurrecting their loved one in years to come.

To get round the issue, Nederland passed a law to prohibit the storage of frozen people within city limits, but could not make this ban retrospective. So the remaining body was adopted by the town, while his relatives left America. They have been battling to get visas to visit ever since.

Meanwhile, the frozen body became a focus of attention from the American media. By 1998, Michael Moore had helped to fund a short film about the strange situation, Grandpa's In The Tuff Shed - a brand of storage hut - by local film director Robin Breeck.

The people of the town were generous neighbours. When the shed was just about to fall down, a local storage company donated a replacement and a Denver radio station raised money to maintain it.

Finally, in 2002, the town decided to re-enact the whole saga to its profit with its first Frozen Dead Guy Days festival, complete with coffin races, snow sculpting and a grandpa Bredo lookalike contest.

The festival has sprang to life yearly since, with an influx of tourists and constant media attention. This year, the nourishing element of the festivities has been enhanced, with a Champagne tour of the allnew shed, a rib-eating contest and a "Thaw Your Bones" chilli cook-off.

In the winter of 2005, according to reports on BBC News Online, the only one being given a truly frosty reception is poor old grandpa Bredo's daughter Aud. President George W Bush, King Harald V and Queen Sonja of Norway have been lobbied by the town's chamber of commerce to help Aud get a visa so that she can act as a marshal for the festival's cryogenic parade (complete with antique hearses, coffin racers, and festival revellers).

Bauge, now 47 and living in Oslo, is campaigning through politicians, embassies and the media to secure his mother's family visit. However, the authorities look set to turn down the application, he told the Sunday Herald yesterday.

"They have not made up their minds yet, but it is a de facto rejection because we will run out of time.

"I put Nederland on the map because of my activities, and I was keen on the idea of a festival as it is very important for me to have local support: I am a member of the chamber of commerce."

Bauge said he is still keen to bring his grandfather back to life.

"When I first got involved in cryonics, cloning was not possible, and people were thinking of cloning the same way. When I return to my grandfather, I would think about either bringing him back, or possibly trying to clone him."

The visa decision is being made tomorrow, and Bauge's mother has a ticket to fly out on Tuesday. If she is not accepted, he says they will appeal and try to get her out to Nederland later in the week.