Frozen Dead Guy Days -- Still A Great Party And Now In Estes Park

ESTES PARK, Colo. — The first time Lauren Bussey came to Frozen Dead Guy Days last year, she had the wrong idea about the event.

“There was this band playing called the Polish Ambush,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “And I thought it was going to be Polish music — you know, the polka.”

So Bussey picked out a formal blue ball gown for the event’s Blue Ball, planning to polka the night away.

When she arrived at the event, which is about 87 miles from Cheyenne, she was greeted with an unexpected and macabre scene.

There were people in white makeup channeling their inner ghosts, dressed in fancy but ghostly Marie Antoinette or Ann Boleyn gowns and Vikings with blue painted skin, beards shining from some kind of blue and silver veins while they held giant axes in one hand and wicked tall beers in the other.

People sported tall and short hats, all with some kind of undead twist, and there were grinning men and women dressed in skeleton pants. And how about those twins decked out in blue, school-girl dresses — clearly a grownup version of the evil ghost twins from the cult horror classic movie “The Shining.”

Corpses sporting lighted capes — delicate like fairy wings — twirled around on the dance floor, and couples in attire fit for a “Fear the Walking Dead” episode tumbled out of hearses. Among these hearses was one particularly eye-catching chariot, equipped with opaque mystery windows that peeked out from underneath a giant batwing-enhanced roof.

A Little Overdressed

Into such macabre visions of death and craziness walked Bussey, a modern-day Cinderella, dressed in a blue princess ball gown, looking for the polka.

For just a moment, it felt like “The Twilight Zone” for Bussey, who quickly realized polkas weren’t going to be on Polish Ambush’s play list that night — or any other — and that the beautiful blue ball gown she’d picked was sort of the exact opposite of the event’s dress code.

But Bussey didn’t let any of those mistakes stop her.

She grabbed a drink and “had a good time anyway,” she said, dancing the night away with all of the undead.

In fact, it was kind of the ultimate seize-the-day — or in this case seize-the-night —move. And because of that, she met the man who is now the love of her life, Ryan Hansen.

This year, Bussey was back, dressed more appropriately in a white-sequined jacket and dress that definitely channeled an undead look, complete with a white-feathered mask that hid her identity.

“This is a tradition that has to be honored every year now,” Hansen told Cowboy State Daily. He was standing next to Bussey dressed in a black raven outfit that hid his face behind a giant, feathered plague doctor mask.

Gesturing to the crowd around him, all headed upstairs to rock out with a band called Here Come The Mummies, he said that, “We come here for the music and all the good vibes.”

THE Frozen Dead Guy

Frozen Dead Guy Days is a celebration built around an actual frozen dead guy named Bredo Morstøl, who has one of the most unique stories on the planet.

Bredo — Grandpa Bredo as festival goers like to call him — is pronounced like “brie” and “dough” mashed together. Say that really fast, though, and it begins to sound suspiciously like “burrito.”

And it sounds even more like burrito when said fast while hungry, one festival goer told Cowboy State Daily, as he eyed a dozen or so food trucks lining the approach to the coffin race arena.

Grandpa Bredo, a Norwegian citizen, was frozen in 1989 right after he died from a heart attack. His grandson Trygve Bauge, a fan of the science of cryonics, which was then in its infancy, orchestrated this, using the inheritance money he received after Breed’s death.

The idea behind cryonics is that someone properly frozen can one day be revived, once all the science catches up, of course, and their life saved at some distant point in the future.

Bredo rested at a California cryonics facility until 1993, when Bauge decided to build his own cryonics research facility in Nederland, Colorado, which is near Boulder. That is how Bredo ultimately arrived in Nederland, which had a population somewhere around 1,400 at the time.

Nederland’s town fathers didn’t learn about Bauge’s plans until after Bauge was deported in 1994, and after his mother called a reporter to ask, “What about the body?”

The subsequent discovery of Bredo, frozen under about 1,000 pounds of dry ice in a dilapidated wooden shed near the house, lit a media firestorm — to the consternation of the local town council, which drew up an ordinance to prohibit keeping frozen bodies, whole or in part, in town.

Eventually that stance was softened and Grandpa Bredo was grandfathered in. Nobody wanted Bredo to thaw out before science might be able to save him.

A Festival To Rival Mike The Headless Chicken

At first, Nederland was embarrassed by all the publicity brough by their local frozen dead guy Bredo, but in time, residents came to embrace the whole history and, in the early 2000s, as the town was collectively racking its brain for a way to keep the town’s businesses alive in the dead of winter, it became the inspiration for one of the world’s most unusual festivals.

At first, the brainstorming for something to enliven local business circled around a rather boring idea, something like a March Madness music festival.

It didn’t take long to see, though, that the real madness would be not embracing this curious history that had once held the world in thrall, and could do so again.

After all, just four hours away in Fruita, Colorado, was a very successful festival celebrating Mike, a chicken who lived without a head for 18 months after his owner failed to properly sever it.

With Fruita’s jubilee as a model, the townsfolk of Nederland put all their creative energy into designing a festival that would embrace Bredo’s whole after-death odyssey and celebrate his story in a new way.

The event would feature live music and beer, a hearse parade, a polar plunge, coffin races and a lookalike contest, along with things like a brain-freeze eating contest and a frozen T-shirt contest.

The polar plunge is particularly relevant to the whole event. Bauge had long been convinced that polar plunges help people live longer. So, he not only founded the Boulder Polar Bear Club, but broke a world record for ice bathing in 1994, staying submerged in a 1,500-gallon tank of ice water for 1 hour and 4 minutes.

Unfortunately, Bauge’s stunt probably drew too much attention to himself and the fact that his visitor visa time had run out, ultimately leading to the deportation that triggered the discovery of Bredo.

An Instant Hit

Frozen Dead Guy Days was a small but instant hit the first year it was held in 2002. It brought about 1,500 people to town, all of whom went home and told their friends about the amazing fun time they’d had up in the snowbound mountains of Colorado.

Soon, little old Nederland was drawing thousands of people from all around the world for an event that celebrates the dead of winter with music, beer and frozen dead guy games.

In fact, the festival grew so much that it outgrew the town that had created it.

The last event in Nederland in 2022 drew an estimated 30,000 people, and the chaos that ensued prompted many locals to decide they really didn’t have the bandwidth for such an event anymore.

After 20 years of success, though, Frozen Dead Guy Days had captured imaginations all around the world and couldn’t be put on ice. There was too much great history there, and too much potential for whoever carried the tradition on.

So, Hotel Stanley owner John Cullen bought the festival for $250,000 from its Nederland owners, and then handed it over to Estes Park, which boasts an arena that can accommodate upward of 50,000 guests.

The festival fits The Stanley well, which has become well-known as a cult horror hotspot thanks to embracing its history as the inspiration behind Stephen King’s classic “The Shining.”

King stayed in Room 217 of The Stanley one winter and had a nightmare there, which inspired his book and eventually leading to a movie deal, and a whole new tourism outlet for The Stanley.

Death May Be Everywhere, But It’s All About Life

Whether it’s the Blue Ball or the hilarious coffin races, where six people race around on snow and ice with a coffin containing a living “dead” person, visions of death are as common as cups of beer throughout the Frozen Dead Guy Days celebration.

But as macabre as it all might seem to those on the outside looking in, none of the festival is really about death at all, as a zombie skier from California related to Cowboy State Daily.

Amber Atkinson came to the Blue Ball decked out in a pink snowsuit cut off mid-thigh. She paired the look with white knee-high boots. It was in homage to all the new friends in Colorado who took her under their wing when she first moved there, eventually teaching her to ski.

“Without them, this is probably what I would really look like,” she said. “Some dumb California skier who died in the snow because she didn’t know what to wear.”

For her, and all the others who wear the mask of death for a few days during Frozen Dead Guy Days, what the festival is really all about is seizing the day and making all the moments of life count for more.

“This event makes you feel like you are 7 years old again,” Atkinson told Cowboy State Daily. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way, because the day that stops is the day I die for real.”

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.