January 17, 2024 • 12 mins
Back in 1994, Nederland, Colorado found out it had a resident it hadn’t accounted for.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave pretending
like she did. She does that a lot, and this
is short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
That's right about it.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Frozen body, that's right exactly. There is no way we
could do this without that, so thank you for clearing
it up right out of the gate.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I feel like we've talked about this festival at some
point on maybe it was one of our videos or something.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
We did an episode on Strange Festivals. I'm sure we
mentioned this, but I don't remember the story behind it.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
So I made the same frozen body joke.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Let's get into it, you can't not. I think that's
the town motto.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
So we're talking about a frozen body of a man
who in life was called Brado Morstole m r ste
L and he was from Norway, and when nineteen eighty
nine rolled around, he was a ripe eighty nine years old.
He'd been living in Norway outside of Oslo for basically
his whole life, and his life had been kind of unremarkable.
(01:04):
Apparently he designed city parks, which is a pretty cool job,
but like he hadn't set the world on fire, and
I don't really think he cared about that from what
I understand, although I don't personally know because I don't
know him, but suffice to say that when he died
in Norway in nineteen eighty nine, it did not make
international news. How about that?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Okay? He had a grandson, and I have no idea
how to pronounce this trick V. I'm not big on
my Norwegian.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
It's really trick v okay.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
And he was really into cryonics in preserving bodies. And
this was in nineteen eighty nine when that wasn't and
it's still not the most common thing, but it's certainly
gained a lot more popularity sure in recent years. But
in eighty nine he was he was kind of, you know,
a groundbreaking guy to try to do something like this
on his own, and that is, try to do this
(01:54):
on his own and say, hey, granddad, I think we
want to preserve you and so so I am going
to build a chryonic facility myself. Eventually, I'd like it
to be a business, but at least want to get
you going because the clock is ticking.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Right, And his grandfather didn't respond because he was dead,
but trig Vy went ahead with the plans anyway. He
had Bredo shipped from Oslo to Oakland. That you know,
typical route that a dead body follows after you expire.
And the reason he ended up in Oakland, California is
because there was an established cryonic facility there called trans Time,
(02:33):
and for three years that's where Brado's first final resting
place was. He was immersed in liquid nitrogen and kept
in an extraordinarily cold temperature to preserve him. Because that's
the point. I mean, we did a whole cryonics episode
if I'm not mistaken, but this is a brief refresher.
The point of cryonics is to preserve the living tissue
(02:56):
to the degree that if we ever figure out how
to reanimate dead people, you will be intact when they
revive you. These doctors of the future. That's the key,
and that's that's what trig v wanted to do with
his grandfather Brado.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, and if you look up one of these facilities today,
they'll say, great, you want just the head or the
whole body?
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, which is very interesting.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
So which is speaking of met Granning. That's also sort
of a Futurama.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Reference totally like Nixon.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
That's right. And as a reminder, I saw a head
in the bucket once. People are talking about that.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Still, that is so crazy.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
So over the course of a few years he got
the help of his mom Oud and said, all right,
I'm building this thing out in Colorado, as it turns out,
a place called Nederland. And it was a legal thing
to do at first, but then he applied for a
permit and they said, nah, you can't do that, and
he said, well, I'm just going to keep doing it
anyway illegally. And in nineteen ninety three, so this is
(03:57):
four ish years after his granddad had died, they said,
all right, I think we're okay. We can move him
from Oakland into our own sort of home setup in Nederland, Colorado.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
It was a decided step down for Braido. We went
from the high life immersed in liquid nitrogen to a
makeshift wooden freezer surrounded by foam, rubber and dry ice blocks.
But apparently it worked. It was good enough for Trigg
V and Odd his mom, and so that's where Brado
(04:32):
set up. Starting in ninety three, they also decided that
they were going to build a structure that could not
only keep a cryonic body indefinitely, the structure itself would
survive and definitely, So they build a concrete structure. They
build it out with studs, and then they stopped there.
And one of the reasons they stopped was because suddenly
(04:53):
all of this stuff came to the attention of the
outside authorities. And I say, we take a break on
that and come back and tell the rest of this crazy,
crazy story. So in nineteen ninety three, Tigby's in his
(05:25):
new house in a wooden structure out back. Apparently he
was in a blue RII sleeping bag, zipped up, surrounded
by foam, foam, rubber, all that, and then outside of
all that were the bricks of dry ice, and I
guess Trigvy for future handiness labeled which end of the
(05:48):
sleeping bag was the head, but was later found to
have gotten it wrong, which is kind of funny. And
they kept it at I think a negative one hundred
and ten degrees celsius, which is pretty pretty cold, but
from what I read, still inadequate for cryonics. But they
kept him that way anyway, and every two weeks they
would have to put new dry ice blocks around him,
(06:08):
and they kept doing that and we're planning on doing
that indefinitely. And about that time immigration officials sipped into
this whole phray.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah, I mean that's kind of the irony of this
whole thing is they were, I guess from the naked
eye what they thought were preserving him, but they weren't
preserving him good enough to ever bring him back to life,
if that were to ever be a thing.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
That's my understanding of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah. So Immigration said, I'm sorry, your visa has run out.
You have to leave the country. So trigg Vy left
in nineteen ninety four and said, Mom, you gotta take
care of your dad there. I'm leaving. He got to
switch this dry dry ice out every two weeks and
keep that temperature down. And mom was like, all right,
I got it. And the news got out a little bit.
(06:51):
This is you know, needle In wasn't the biggest place.
It probably still isn't the biggest town. And get the
feeling that trigg Vy was sort of an eccentric there,
ye did.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
The local polar bear plunge tradition.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Awesome, that's fun. So when he got deported, you know,
there were interviews being done by the local alternative weekly
and they got in touch with Mom. During this interview,
she I get the feeling sort of accidentally set out loud,
like I wonder what's going to happen with Dad's remains now.
And then the word was out that there was a
(07:25):
frozen dead guy in the town, and eventually that would
become a festival called Frozen Dead Guy Days.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, because very quickly this story got out of Colorado
and went around the world, and Nederland decided, hey, we
could capitalize on this, like, yes, this is a really
weird story, and people think were weirdos for having a
guy who had his dead grandfather frozen out back, but
let's do something with that. And the Chamber of Commerce
came up with Frozen Dead Guy Days starting in two
(07:56):
thousand and two, which is, you know, definitely making lemonade
out of lemons, I guess you could say. But in
the meantime there was still the matter of what to
do with Braido. Right after it was found out that
Brado was out back, and not only Brado, by the way,
Triggvy had gotten his first paying customer. So Brado and
(08:17):
a man named Al Campbell shared that makeshift freezer for
a little while, but the Netherlands town council said, we actually,
like we've got something on the books right, like this
is illegal. What they hadn't factored in him is that
Triggvy was a died in the wool libertarian, the kind
of guy who would raised holy heck for arbitrary you know,
(08:39):
movements or decisions by the government, and he forced that. No,
it was not very clear what the town's position on
keeping a frozen dead body of a relative out back
in your house was, and so Brado got grandfathered in,
even after the town passed a new ordnance saying like
you can't.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Do that anymore, No pun intended.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Oh grandfathered in. Yeah, it really wasn't, is the sad thing.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
So he's there still, he's allowed to stay, and so
all of a sudden he needs a little help taking
care of grandpa. He puts out an ad and says,
I need someone to help me take care. You have
to like change out this dry ice, check on him,
that kind of thing. And a guy named Bo Schaffer said,
I'll do it and so for and not only will
I do it, he did it for thirty years. He
(09:26):
looked over this guy that wasn't even his grandpa bringing
in that fresh dry ice, packing him every two weeks,
making sure he was okay and checking in on him,
and I think it's pretty remarkable. Eventually that shed needed
some work because of a blizzard, and the local rock
radio station got involved, and of course, you know, like
local rock radio does, they find some kind of weird
(09:48):
thing to get behind for some press, and they ended
up getting Tough Sheds, the company, which is great, by
the way, big fan of Tough Sheds. Oh yeah, oh yeah,
I've got one. They're awesome, And they're awesome because they
donated this shed free of charge. Also good press for them,
and of course the radio station painted their you know,
(10:09):
their logo and stuff on the side of it. So
now this guy wait wait.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Wait, not just what their logo was, they you have
to say the words that they also painted on this structure.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Well, I think that was their thing. They were classic rock.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
They painted classic rock on the shed that held Breido's
frozen corpse.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Oh yeah, they had to take advantage of it. So
from that point on, it was, you know, not much
of a story. I mean, they had their frozen dead
guys festival. Bredo was still there and in twenty twenty,
I imagine because of COVID, the town Chamber of Commerce
went bankrupt. The town kind of fell on harder times,
and they sold the rights to that festival to a
(10:48):
private entity. And everyone was like, this thing stinks now.
It's just not the same as it used to be.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah, it got moved to ST's Park, which is a
little ways away, lost the edginess of it, It wasn't
rough around the edges anymore, and it lost its spirit
according to the people who liked the original version. That
was one thing that changed. Another thing that changed around
that time is that Trickby started looking for a third
(11:16):
final resting place for his grandfather Braido, And in August
of twenty twenty three, the town of Nederland found out
that their famous Frozen Dead Guy Brado had been moved
to SD's Park. Like Frozen Dead Guide Dates had been
to the Stanley Hotel.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
That Stanley Hotel, the same one that inspired the Shining
when Stephen King and his family vacation there. So if
you ever hear anyone say you know what the Stanley
Hotel is known for, right, just kind of throw them
off base and say, yeah, they have a cryonics museum
and a frozen dead Grandpa.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, that's where Brado is. He's in an exhibit sponsored
by alcre one of the leading cryonics companies, and who
knows where his next final resting place will be, but
that's where you can find him. Now.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
I hope this is it, but I have a feeling
it won't be.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
No way, not in an exhibit at the Stanley Hotel.
He's gonna end up somewhere else, and I for one
can't wait to see where it is.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I wonder if we should raise some money and see
if we can take custody.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Yeah, like KRFX one oh three point five, the Fox.
That's how we wait end. That's how we'll do it.
We're gonna paint classic rock and sysk on whatever we
built for him too. I love it, well, Chuck said,
I love it. And you can't really end on a
better note than that. So short stuff is apt.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave pretending
like she did. She does that a lot, and this
is short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
That's right about it.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Frozen body, that's right exactly. There is no way we
could do this without that, so thank you for clearing
it up right out of the gate.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I feel like we've talked about this festival at some
point on maybe it was one of our videos or something.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
We did an episode on Strange Festivals. I'm sure we
mentioned this, but I don't remember the story behind it.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
So I made the same frozen body joke.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Let's get into it, you can't not. I think that's
the town motto.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
So we're talking about a frozen body of a man
who in life was called Brado Morstole m r ste
L and he was from Norway, and when nineteen eighty
nine rolled around, he was a ripe eighty nine years old.
He'd been living in Norway outside of Oslo for basically
his whole life, and his life had been kind of unremarkable.
(01:04):
Apparently he designed city parks, which is a pretty cool job,
but like he hadn't set the world on fire, and
I don't really think he cared about that from what
I understand, although I don't personally know because I don't
know him, but suffice to say that when he died
in Norway in nineteen eighty nine, it did not make
international news. How about that?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Okay? He had a grandson, and I have no idea
how to pronounce this trick V. I'm not big on
my Norwegian.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
It's really trick v okay.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
And he was really into cryonics in preserving bodies. And
this was in nineteen eighty nine when that wasn't and
it's still not the most common thing, but it's certainly
gained a lot more popularity sure in recent years. But
in eighty nine he was he was kind of, you know,
a groundbreaking guy to try to do something like this
on his own, and that is, try to do this
(01:54):
on his own and say, hey, granddad, I think we
want to preserve you and so so I am going
to build a chryonic facility myself. Eventually, I'd like it
to be a business, but at least want to get
you going because the clock is ticking.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Right, And his grandfather didn't respond because he was dead,
but trig Vy went ahead with the plans anyway. He
had Bredo shipped from Oslo to Oakland. That you know,
typical route that a dead body follows after you expire.
And the reason he ended up in Oakland, California is
because there was an established cryonic facility there called trans Time,
(02:33):
and for three years that's where Brado's first final resting
place was. He was immersed in liquid nitrogen and kept
in an extraordinarily cold temperature to preserve him. Because that's
the point. I mean, we did a whole cryonics episode
if I'm not mistaken, but this is a brief refresher.
The point of cryonics is to preserve the living tissue
(02:56):
to the degree that if we ever figure out how
to reanimate dead people, you will be intact when they
revive you. These doctors of the future. That's the key,
and that's that's what trig v wanted to do with
his grandfather Brado.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, and if you look up one of these facilities today,
they'll say, great, you want just the head or the
whole body?
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, which is very interesting.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
So which is speaking of met Granning. That's also sort
of a Futurama.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Reference totally like Nixon.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
That's right. And as a reminder, I saw a head
in the bucket once. People are talking about that.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Still, that is so crazy.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
So over the course of a few years he got
the help of his mom Oud and said, all right,
I'm building this thing out in Colorado, as it turns out,
a place called Nederland. And it was a legal thing
to do at first, but then he applied for a
permit and they said, nah, you can't do that, and
he said, well, I'm just going to keep doing it
anyway illegally. And in nineteen ninety three, so this is
(03:57):
four ish years after his granddad had died, they said,
all right, I think we're okay. We can move him
from Oakland into our own sort of home setup in Nederland, Colorado.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
It was a decided step down for Braido. We went
from the high life immersed in liquid nitrogen to a
makeshift wooden freezer surrounded by foam, rubber and dry ice blocks.
But apparently it worked. It was good enough for Trigg
V and Odd his mom, and so that's where Brado
(04:32):
set up. Starting in ninety three, they also decided that
they were going to build a structure that could not
only keep a cryonic body indefinitely, the structure itself would
survive and definitely, So they build a concrete structure. They
build it out with studs, and then they stopped there.
And one of the reasons they stopped was because suddenly
(04:53):
all of this stuff came to the attention of the
outside authorities. And I say, we take a break on
that and come back and tell the rest of this crazy,
crazy story. So in nineteen ninety three, Tigby's in his
(05:25):
new house in a wooden structure out back. Apparently he
was in a blue RII sleeping bag, zipped up, surrounded
by foam, foam, rubber, all that, and then outside of
all that were the bricks of dry ice, and I
guess Trigvy for future handiness labeled which end of the
(05:48):
sleeping bag was the head, but was later found to
have gotten it wrong, which is kind of funny. And
they kept it at I think a negative one hundred
and ten degrees celsius, which is pretty pretty cold, but
from what I read, still inadequate for cryonics. But they
kept him that way anyway, and every two weeks they
would have to put new dry ice blocks around him,
(06:08):
and they kept doing that and we're planning on doing
that indefinitely. And about that time immigration officials sipped into
this whole phray.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah, I mean that's kind of the irony of this
whole thing is they were, I guess from the naked
eye what they thought were preserving him, but they weren't
preserving him good enough to ever bring him back to life,
if that were to ever be a thing.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
That's my understanding of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah. So Immigration said, I'm sorry, your visa has run out.
You have to leave the country. So trigg Vy left
in nineteen ninety four and said, Mom, you gotta take
care of your dad there. I'm leaving. He got to
switch this dry dry ice out every two weeks and
keep that temperature down. And mom was like, all right,
I got it. And the news got out a little bit.
(06:51):
This is you know, needle In wasn't the biggest place.
It probably still isn't the biggest town. And get the
feeling that trigg Vy was sort of an eccentric there,
ye did.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
The local polar bear plunge tradition.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Awesome, that's fun. So when he got deported, you know,
there were interviews being done by the local alternative weekly
and they got in touch with Mom. During this interview,
she I get the feeling sort of accidentally set out loud,
like I wonder what's going to happen with Dad's remains now.
And then the word was out that there was a
(07:25):
frozen dead guy in the town, and eventually that would
become a festival called Frozen Dead Guy Days.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, because very quickly this story got out of Colorado
and went around the world, and Nederland decided, hey, we
could capitalize on this, like, yes, this is a really
weird story, and people think were weirdos for having a
guy who had his dead grandfather frozen out back, but
let's do something with that. And the Chamber of Commerce
came up with Frozen Dead Guy Days starting in two
(07:56):
thousand and two, which is, you know, definitely making lemonade
out of lemons, I guess you could say. But in
the meantime there was still the matter of what to
do with Braido. Right after it was found out that
Brado was out back, and not only Brado, by the way,
Triggvy had gotten his first paying customer. So Brado and
(08:17):
a man named Al Campbell shared that makeshift freezer for
a little while, but the Netherlands town council said, we actually,
like we've got something on the books right, like this
is illegal. What they hadn't factored in him is that
Triggvy was a died in the wool libertarian, the kind
of guy who would raised holy heck for arbitrary you know,
(08:39):
movements or decisions by the government, and he forced that. No,
it was not very clear what the town's position on
keeping a frozen dead body of a relative out back
in your house was, and so Brado got grandfathered in,
even after the town passed a new ordnance saying like
you can't.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Do that anymore, No pun intended.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Oh grandfathered in. Yeah, it really wasn't, is the sad thing.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
So he's there still, he's allowed to stay, and so
all of a sudden he needs a little help taking
care of grandpa. He puts out an ad and says,
I need someone to help me take care. You have
to like change out this dry ice, check on him,
that kind of thing. And a guy named Bo Schaffer said,
I'll do it and so for and not only will
I do it, he did it for thirty years. He
(09:26):
looked over this guy that wasn't even his grandpa bringing
in that fresh dry ice, packing him every two weeks,
making sure he was okay and checking in on him,
and I think it's pretty remarkable. Eventually that shed needed
some work because of a blizzard, and the local rock
radio station got involved, and of course, you know, like
local rock radio does, they find some kind of weird
(09:48):
thing to get behind for some press, and they ended
up getting Tough Sheds, the company, which is great, by
the way, big fan of Tough Sheds. Oh yeah, oh yeah,
I've got one. They're awesome, And they're awesome because they
donated this shed free of charge. Also good press for them,
and of course the radio station painted their you know,
(10:09):
their logo and stuff on the side of it. So
now this guy wait wait.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Wait, not just what their logo was, they you have
to say the words that they also painted on this structure.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Well, I think that was their thing. They were classic rock.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
They painted classic rock on the shed that held Breido's
frozen corpse.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Oh yeah, they had to take advantage of it. So
from that point on, it was, you know, not much
of a story. I mean, they had their frozen dead
guys festival. Bredo was still there and in twenty twenty,
I imagine because of COVID, the town Chamber of Commerce
went bankrupt. The town kind of fell on harder times,
and they sold the rights to that festival to a
(10:48):
private entity. And everyone was like, this thing stinks now.
It's just not the same as it used to be.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah, it got moved to ST's Park, which is a
little ways away, lost the edginess of it, It wasn't
rough around the edges anymore, and it lost its spirit
according to the people who liked the original version. That
was one thing that changed. Another thing that changed around
that time is that Trickby started looking for a third
(11:16):
final resting place for his grandfather Braido, And in August
of twenty twenty three, the town of Nederland found out
that their famous Frozen Dead Guy Brado had been moved
to SD's Park. Like Frozen Dead Guide Dates had been
to the Stanley Hotel.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
That Stanley Hotel, the same one that inspired the Shining
when Stephen King and his family vacation there. So if
you ever hear anyone say you know what the Stanley
Hotel is known for, right, just kind of throw them
off base and say, yeah, they have a cryonics museum
and a frozen dead Grandpa.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, that's where Brado is. He's in an exhibit sponsored
by alcre one of the leading cryonics companies, and who
knows where his next final resting place will be, but
that's where you can find him. Now.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
I hope this is it, but I have a feeling
it won't be.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
No way, not in an exhibit at the Stanley Hotel.
He's gonna end up somewhere else, and I for one
can't wait to see where it is.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I wonder if we should raise some money and see
if we can take custody.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Yeah, like KRFX one oh three point five, the Fox.
That's how we wait end. That's how we'll do it.
We're gonna paint classic rock and sysk on whatever we
built for him too. I love it, well, Chuck said,
I love it. And you can't really end on a
better note than that. So short stuff is apt.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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