Frozen Dead Guy Days
- Nederland
Getting stir crazy by March? Go crazy with
one of Colorado’s weirder communities
(Boulder, eat your heart out) and celebrate
budget cyronics Tuff Sheds and a town that has
a corpse on ice as the most famous resident.
It all started with Trygve Bauge. Bauge
moved to Nederland from Norway in 1980 to
up his chances of surviving a nuclear war.
Along the way, he started the Boulder Polar
Bear Club, dedicated to jumping in a really,
really cold reservoir each New Year’s Day and
began researching cyronics, basically freezing a
dead person in hope that they can be thawed
later for a new lease on life.
When his grandfather Bredo Moestol died
Nov. 6, 1989, in Norway, Bauge had the body
packed in ice, shipped to Los Angeles and cryogenically
frozen, then two years later, brought
him to his disaster-proof home, although the
already dead grandpa was relegated to a
wooden shed, where Bauge kept him on ice,
literally.
For a while, Moestol had a shed mate, Al
Campbell, a Chicago resident who wound up
dead in the shed. Campbell had a friend paying
hundreds of dollars a month to keep in the
Rocky Mountain Cryogenics Facility, also
known as “Trygve’s shed.”
But no one except Bauge and his mother
and roommate Aud Bauge knew.
Trygve Bauge was deported for failing to
have a passport, visa or green card in 1994.
Aud Bauge was evicted from the castle-like
concrete home for not having water or electricity.
Concerned grandpa and Campbell would
thaw, she asked a reporter to plead her case to
the town. Suddenly everyone was aware of the
Bauge’s icy little secret, and the town could not
find a law denying the right to keep frozen
bodies on one’s property, so they made one,
but Moestol was, ahem, grandfathered in.
Campbell’s family retrieved him for burial.
Bo Shaffer, a Denver resident, hauls dry ice
up monthly to repack and check on Moestol.
By 2002, grandpa was the coat hook for a
celebration of Nederland civic pride and Frozen
Dead Guy Days was born. For three years,
Trygve and Aud Bauge smiled upon the event
from their home in exile but filed suit with
Nederland over the money and use of
Moestol’s image.
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