BREDO MORSTØL’S LIFE was relatively quiet and ordinary. Born in 1900, the Norwegian was a director of parks and recreation in a county near Oslo for more than 30 years. He had a daughter. He painted, skied, and fished. And eventually, following years of cardiovascular issues, he died in his sleep at the ripe age of 89.
His afterlife, on the other hand, could be the plot for a sci-fi film.
Affectionately known as “Grandpa Bredo,” Morstøl spent much of the last three decades packed in dry ice inside a Tuff shed in the small town of Nederland, Colorado, some 4,700 miles away from home. And if it weren’t for a few strange twists of fate, he’d still be tucked away in this bizarre DIY cryonics set-up, a guinea pig for his grandson’s immortality experiments.
Cryonics, or the freezing of human corpses and brains for future revival, is still very much bleeding edge technology. There are no guarantees that Grandpa Bredo—or the hundreds of people who have opted in for this procedure under the best of circ*mstances—will breathe, blink, or think again. And Grandpa Bredo didn’t have the best of circ*mstances. No liquid nitrogen. No shiny dewar to store his body in. No consent.
Instead, Grandpa Bredo’s indefinite suspension serves as what is surely both a lesson and a milestone: the longest endeavor at amateur human cryopreservation.
A photo of Grandpa Bredo hangs above his frozen body in a DIY cryonics shed in Nederland, Colorado, in 2007.
THE STORY BEGINS IN 1980 with Grandpa Bredo’s freewheeling grandson, Trygve Bauge, who left Norway for Nederland, Colorado. A devotee of survivalism, cloning, ice bathing, and cryonics with a touch of libertarian anarchy, he stayed in the United States, refusing to apply for a visa. When his grandfather died nine years later, Bauge reportedly had him moved to a cryonics facility in California called Trans Time. Grandpa Bredo would wind up spending about four years in liquid nitrogen there.
But because Bauge had plans to build his own homemade cryo facility, he relocated his late grandfather to Nederland in 1993, packing him in a huge box filled with hundreds of pounds of dry ice inside a Tuff shed for the time being. Bauge secured the services of Delta Tech, a local environmental company, to keep his DIY cryonics facility running, replenishing the dry ice every two weeks for about $1,000 per month.
Biologically speaking, even if cryonics does work, the various changes of venue would have wreaked havoc on Grandpa Bredo’s body.
“As soon as a person dies, their cells start undergoing all sorts of changes,” says Venki Ramakrishnan, Ph.D., a British-American structural biologist and author of Why We Die. “They get starved for oxygen. They start sending alarm signals. They start … the process of decaying. There’s a lot of natural damage that occurs from the point of death to the point of freezing … we don’t know how to reverse that.”
Bo Shaffer shows a crowd the temperature inside Grandpa Bredo’s box, which is around -80 degrees Fahrenheit. Better known as “The Iceman,” Shaffer put 1,600 pounds of dry ice atop Grandpa Bredo every month for over a decade.
In fact, Ramakrishnan, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, wrote a whole chapter in his book arguing against efforts to extend the human lifespan through cryonics. Freezing the body actually causes tissue deterioration, he explains, “because water expands when frozen and just destroys the structure around it.”
However, cryonics facilities have implemented practices meant to curtail these icy risks. At the Alcor cryonics lab in Scottsdale, Arizona, which has amassed over 230 “patients” since 1972, doctors use a cryopreservative fluid to replace all of the blood in the individual’s circulatory system. Optimally, this happens immediately after death, explains James Arrowood, Alcor’s president and co-CEO. The cryopreservative is made from the proteins of fish that live in cold places like the Antarctic. According to the National Science Foundation, these fish have developed proteins that “depress the freezing point of blood and body fluids” to just below the freezing point of seawater, inhibiting the formation of ice crystals.
Trans Time, the cryonics facility where Grandpa Bredo spent four years in liquid nitrogen in the early 90s, began experimenting with fish proteins well before the old man arrived, but it’s unlikely the company could have used such technology on him. Alcor’s website notes that, even today, if the patient has been dead for several days, the company can’t use its cryoprotectant because the blood vessels will be blocked. Further complicating matters, Grandpa Bredo would have been about 200 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the Tuff shed than in liquid nitrogen. The cold would have prevented bacteria from growing and slowed decay much like a morgue refrigerator, Ramakrishnan says, but it could not completely stop either process. So, Grandpa Bredo likely had a lot of cellular and organ damage by this time—even if it wasn’t apparent from the outside.
AFTER A STRANGE CHAIN OF EVENTS that would lead to Bauge’s deportation from the U.S. in 1994, Grandpa Bredo’s fate was in limbo. The town of Nederland ordered that his body be removed, and added a broad new provision to its municipal code that outlawed the keeping of “the whole or any part of the person, body, or carcass of a human being or animal or other biological species which is not alive upon any property.” Bauge fought it from Norway and a group of locals in Nederland helped. In the end, the city had to admit that Grandpa Bredo had been there before the law was passed and was, therefore, “grandfathered” in. His icy slumber in the Tuff shed carried on.
In 2002, when the town of Nederland was thinking of ways to boost tourism, it decided to capitalize on its most famous resident, Grandpa Bredo. Frozen Dead Guy Days was born. The festival included coffin races, a Blue Ball, champagne tours of the Tuff shed, Polar Plunges, a parade, and more. But 20 years later, the town just couldn’t sustain the popular festival anymore; it had grown too large and had become too expensive.
A coffin race at the Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland, Colorado, in 2018.
Fortunately, the man who owned the Stanley Hotel in nearby Estes Park, Colorado, thought his place would be perfect for the festival, considering it inspired Stephen King’s 1977 horror novel The Shining—which, of course, has a connection to a frozen dead guy. He bought the festival and, with Bauge’s blessing, arranged to move Grandpa Bredo to the hotel, returning him to a more standard cryonics procedure: preservation in a bath of liquid nitrogen.
Alcor was their choice for cryonics.
At first, the company wanted nothing to do with the project, Arrowood says. It looked like a complete circus. But after talking with the board, Alcor decided it was a rare opportunity to advance the field: it would be able to build a cryonics museum of sorts on the property. Plus, while it costs around $200,000 to cryonically preserve a body, Alcor’s model is nonprofit; families essentially donate their loved ones’ bodies to science, Arrowood says. So Alcor could conceivably perform a CAT scan to study the impact of Grandpa Bredo’s previous DIY cryo-storage—if it could find a way to do so without damaging the body.
In 2023, Arrowood sent a team to check on the condition of Grandpa Bredo, who was packed in a metal type of coffin used to ship bodies. A look at his face—and this was about the extent of what the team could do, considering they could not further compromise the body in any way—told them he had been well preserved. The actual moving had to happen at 4 a.m. because the team knew some Nederland residents would protest Grandpa Bredo’s departure. Alcor was ready with a team of former Navy Seals.
“When these guys are just standing around they look like any four guys. But when you say ‘Go’ they are so fast and their movements are so synchronized,” Arrowood says. As they called out times and temperatures, the team unpacked Grandpa from his box, moved him into a van, repacked him, and drove him an hour through the mountains to the hotel. There, they had a special crane to lower him into the cryo chamber, which is in a supposedly haunted building designated as the International Cryonics Museum.
It’s much fancier, but possibly less folksy and romantic, than his home in the Tuff shed.
So far, Alcor hasn’t performed any scans to study Grandpa Bredo’s condition, because there wasn’t ample time between transporting the body and putting him in the tank of liquid nitrogen. Given what he’s been through, though, Ramakrishnan says Grandpa Bredo has probably incurred significant damage to his brain as well as the rest of his body. Plus, the man was almost 90 when he died. So, like a mummified body, he may look pretty good for a guy who has been dead for more than 30 years, but if he were thawed, he would probably decompose pretty quickly.
Bauge has reportedly made peace with that. He’s now moving on to Plan B for his grandfather’s immortality: cloning.
Susan Lahey
Contributor
Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She's covered ocean wave energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery; healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.
