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BREDO MORSTOEL
1900–1989 (AND BEYOND)
In a town called Nederland, Colorado, outside a nuclear-
bomb-proof house, inside a Tuff Shed, at the bottom of a
large freezer, next to a half-eaten birthday cake, lies the body of Bredo
Morstoel.
Or so I’d heard.
The story had been told and told again. Bredo Morstoel had died
at age eighty-nine in his native Norway. His daughter Aud and his
grandson Trygve Bauge had flown his body to Colorado, where the
two were then residing. But Trygve, a budding entrepreneur in the
field of cryonics, had decided to keep Grandpa around. Grandpa
Bredo died in 1989, and in 2005 his body is still on ice in a Tuff Shed
in Nederland.
When I first heard about Grandpa Bredo, I thought I would have to
see for myself this curious experiment in human preservation. I
thought Grandpa might teach me something about cryonics -- how
it’s done, why we bother, what it says about us. But, as a townsperson
says to me later, the preservation of Grandpa is the “1968 VW Bug of
cryonics” -- hardly worthy of the scientific category, even such as it is.
What I stumbled into instead was a curious experiment in death celebration, or the story of a community that initially recoiled from death
but came to embrace, laugh at, and profit from it. What I stumbled
into was the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival.
Nederland is a no-stoplight town twenty miles west of Boulder,
8,233 feet above sea level. One spaghetti of a road takes you there,
twisting and turning as it slithers up the snow-capped mountain. I am
the white-knuckled, baby-on-board driver creeping up that road in an
economy-size rental car as four-wheel-drive SUVs pile up behind me.
The town has one inn and one supermarket and 1,380 residents -- a
disproportionate lot of them, shall we say, different. There’s Toasty
Post and the Iceman, and then there’s Amy the ghost buster (more on
her later). In a recent mayoral race, the field of candidates included a
convicted felon and a dog.
It takes serious eccentricity to stand out in that company, as Trygve
Bauge did -- or, more important, it takes PR. Trygve was already
known in the Boulder area for his self-publicized exploits running
from immigration authorities (to avoid deportation for overstaying
his visa) and staging a mock hijacking prank at the airport (to -- oh,
who knows why). The skinny, long-haired Norwegian eventually
drifted up to Nederland to build his dream home: a concrete-and-metal bunker that would withstand nuclear, biological, and alien attack. No one can remember Trygve ever holding a job. He seemed too
busy pursuing his two passions: ice-bathing, in which he claims to
hold the world record at one hour, five minutes and fifty-one seconds,
and the practice of what he calls “life extension.”
Which brings us back to Grandpa Bredo. Not a whole lot is
known about Bredo Morstoel, at least to the people of Nederland,
being that he took up residence here only after his death. In the one
photograph I’ve seen, he has tufty white eyebrows and ruddy skin, and
he’s squinting at the camera. He worked for the parks department in
Norway, was married, and had two children. He liked to paint, fish,
ski, and hike. During a family vacation in the mountains in 1989,
Bredo had a heart attack while napping and died.
I learn much of this through the sleuthing of Barbara Lawlor.
Lawlor is Nederland’s Lois Lane, a one-woman media machine whose
byline accompanies virtually every article and photograph in the
weekly Mountain-Ear. Lawlor is deeply tanned and white haired and
looks as if she could hike to Boulder and back in under an hour. A
Wisconsin native who took the reporting job to support her four
adopted children, she’s not one to suffer fools -- but a story is a story,
so she wearily took Trygve’s incessant calls. It was Lawlor he called to
witness his record-breaking polar-bear dip in an ice-filled cistern wearing a pair of boxers and a Norwegian flag. It was at Lawlor’s door that
Trygve turned up one night demanding sanctuary from immigration
officials. And, soon after Trygve was finally deported in 1994, it was
Lawlor his mother, Aud, called with an odd and disturbing request.
“I remember it was Mother’s Day,” says Lawlor. “Aud came to me,
crying, saying something about going down to Town Hall and getting
help putting dry ice on her father.” After some questioning, Aud explained the situation. Lawlor knew this was more than just a scoop.
“Well, I went to Town Hall for her and said, ‘There’s a dead body on
this property,’ and they went nuts, and that’s how it all started.”
Police and town officials raced up the dirt roads to Trygve’s
bunker. Sure enough, in a Tuff Shed a few feet from the house was a
wooden sarcophagus containing a lot of ice and the body of Bredo
Morstoel. It also held the intact remains of one Al Campbell of Chicago, apparently the first paying customer of Trygve Bauge’s backyard
cryonics lab.
All hell, as they say, broke loose. The dailies and the wires beat
Lawlor’s weekly to the story, and within days Norwegian camera
crews were camped out on Lawlor’s floor. COLORADO TOWN FINDS 2
BODIES ON ICE; MAN HOPED TO REVIVE THEM, read a May 12, 1994,
Chicago Tribune headline. The Associated Press followed up with frozen
bodies get chilly reception from town leaders.
Chilly? Nederlanders were horrified that their bucolic mountain
town was now known in England and Japan for its resident frozen
dead guy. In an emergency session of the Nederland Town Council,
officials slapped together an ordinance heretofore outlawing the storage of dead human or animal parts on residential property -- thereby
effectively banning pork chops from freezers. The law didn’t affect
Grandpa, who, as locals like to say for the yuks, was grandfathered in.
So Grandpa Bredo remained in Nederland, outside a nuclear-bomb-proof house, inside a Tuff Shed, at the bottom of a large
freezer, next to a half-eaten birthday cake. (Campbell’s body was immediately shipped back to Chicago.) The Tuff Shed is new and improved, donated by the company.The rickety wooden sarcophagus has
been replaced by a stainless-steel box. The bombproof house is currently uninhabited, but a local hired by Trygve visits Grandpa every five
weeks to replenish his bed with eight hundred pounds of dry ice.
Or so I’d heard.
