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The Atlas Obscura Podcast

Frozen Dead Guy (Classic)

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Places & Travel, Society & Culture

4.61.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Atop a mountain in a picturesque Colorado town is the frozen corpse of a Norwegian grandpa. We get the tale of how this came to be, from the person who for years has trekked up and down the mountain for this unique preservation mission. READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/frozen-dead-guy-days

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

If you want to experience some of the best mountain views that you can in Colorado, you might just want to make a trip to Netherlands.

0:08.0

This small town is about 25 minutes east of Boulder, and it sits 8,000 feet above sea level.

0:15.0

It's a beautiful little town. It's got green pine trees all over the place. There's skiing, there's hiking,

0:21.2

there's mountain biking. And there's one other thing. Perched on one of its mountains is a very small,

0:28.8

very inconspicuous shed. And inside that shed is the corpse of a Norwegian grandpa. He's been laying

0:36.1

there preserved in ice for more than 30 years.

0:42.3

My name is Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Upskira, a celebration of the world's strange,

0:48.0

incredible, and wondrous places.

0:50.7

Today, we are going to Netherlands, Colorado to tell you how that Norwegian grandpa got into that shed and where he's going next.

0:59.7

After this. Once upon a time, there was a Norwegian gentleman named Bredo Mostell.

1:33.4

He was a supervisor in the Oslo Public Works Department, so Parks and Recreation.

1:42.7

He had a green thumb, and he loved the outdoors and was such a kind gentleman that he was the patriarch of the family.

1:45.7

That is Brad Wickham. He got to know Bredo Morstelle almost a decade ago, at which point he'd only been dead for, you know, 20 some years.

1:53.7

Brad is Bredo's caretaker. Yes, Bretto is dead, but he still needs a caretaker. But we'll get back to that.

2:02.4

Bretto grew up in Norway and was a lover of the outdoors.

2:05.8

He especially loved hunting and cross-country skiing.

2:09.1

Skiing was his passion, and I believe it was that he was skiing when he had his heart attack at 89 years old.

2:16.0

When Bretto died in 1989, his grandson, Trigv, had what he considered a brilliant idea.

2:25.4

Trigvie was a big believer in cryonics.

2:30.2

Cryonics is the process of freezing a body at hundreds of degrees below zero so that you might

2:35.5

resurrect that person at some point in the future. The movement was founded by a physics teacher

2:40.6

and science fiction enthusiast from Detroit in the 1960s, and the first person frozen after death

...

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