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Updated: 03/06/02



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Wednesday, 6 March, 2002

Nederland, Colorado. Forty miles northwest of Denver. This is the place to be on Saturday, the site of the "Frozen Dead Guy Festival." The festival honors the town's most famous dead resident, Bredo Morstoel, who died in his native Norway in 1989.

After his death, his devoted grandson, Trygve Bauge, shipped the body to Colorado and preserved it in a makeshift cryogenics laboratory in a shed in his backyard for a day in the future when granddad could be thawed and brought back to life.

Unfortunately Bauge never bothered to become a legal U.S. resident, and was eventually deported, leaving gramps frozen in the shed. The town leaders learned of the body and its odd preservation system and took the obvious next step: they instituted a festival.

The festival features a coffin race, pancake breakfast, a grandpa look-alike contest and a tour of the shed where Bredo is preserved at minus 109 F. There's also a Grandpa Ball where Chip and the Chowderheads will be the featured entertainment.

Now, granted, it doesn't have the same je ne sais quoi of the Groundhog Day celebrations at Gobbler's Knob, but it's not bad when your main draw is a corpse.

It reminds me of the urban legend about Walt Disney. The story went that he arranged to have himself frozen in cryonic chamber full of liquid nitrogen upon his death, and he now awaits the day when medical technology makes his re-animation possible. The story is not true, but I've heard it for years. There's a website called Snopes that specializes in de-bunking urban legends.

I'm afraid this is a short post tonight. While I'm feeling much better today, I'm still pretty tired, so it is an early to bed night.

[Just trying not to become a "Frozen Dead Gal" before my time.]

~ ~ ~

Quote du jour:

"A rumor is one thing that gets
thicker instead of thinner as it is spread."

-- Richard Armour (1906 - 1989) US poet

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