Frozen Dead Guy Days sold, to move to Estes Park

ESTES PARK – Frozen Dead Guy Days is back from the dead.

Visit Estes Park and the Stanley Hotel have teamed up to rescue the quirky festival that had been staged since 2002 in Nederland, announcing that it would be held next year on St. Patrick’s Day weekend in Estes Park.

Leaders of the tourism-promotion agency and the iconic hotel, made famous for its reported ghost sightings and its role in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 psychological horror film “The Shining,” said Thursday the move was the perfect answer to save the festival after its owners and organizers in Nederland announced in November they were canceling it.

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“Visit Estes Park is very excited about partnering with the Stanley,” said CEO Kara Franker after the VEP board met Thursday night. “Nederland has done an incredible job of hosting and growing this brand for years. We want to carry on the legacy, and we think we can give new life to Frozen Dead Guy Days.

“We can resuscitate it,” she said, “which is sort of funny.”

John Cullen, the Stanley’s owner who has played on the majestic inn’s haunted reputation with ghost tours, horror film festivals, seances and magic acts, purchased the celebration of all things macabre just weeks ago from the Nederland  pair who had been running it, Amanda Macdonald and Sarah Moseley Martin. To complete the acquisition, he said, he and Visit Estes Park will chip in $75,000 each and then apply for a $100,000 grant from the Colorado Tourism Office, a division of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

His plan is to run Frozen Dead Guy Days as a nonprofit event, with all proceeds going toward providing workforce housing and child care for workers in the tourism-dependent mountain town at the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. Those needs prompted Estes Park voters to pass an increase in the lodging tax in the November municipal election.

The Colorado Tourism Office “created this entire fund during the pandemic to keep events and festivals in the state of Colorado, and we think this fits squarely into their goals,” Franker said. “If we get the grant, great, but if we don’t, we’re going to be OK too.”

“We are approaching the state for a $100,000 festival grant with the idea that we’re going to relaunch the festival in – God help us – 110 days,” Cullen said. “This is aggressive even by my standards. It’s a good thing I don’t have a boss.

“But only the Stanley is weird enough, strong enough, and – together with Visit Estes Park – crazy enough to launch this thing in 110 days. And we do weird really well.”

Cullen said events surrounding the festival could be held both at the hotel and Estes Park’s sprawling fairgrounds, which also draws tens of thousands of visitors for the Longs Peak Scottish-Irish Festival each September. 

“If we do this right and have the use of the fairgrounds, this thing could pull in 30,000 plus,” Cullen said. “Using the resources of Visit Estes Park, which is a major organization with nine full-time professionals, is really how you make that happen – plus the Stanley with its 400 employees – is how you make this thing successful.

“I’m very glad to partner with Visit Estes Park on this,” he said. “It’s going to be a real challenge, but they’re a professional organization that’s going to bring in national planning groups. It would never have gotten here without Sarah and Amanda, but we’ve got to bring in some major players to take this to the next level.”

Added Franker, “We’re not stealing it. We’re resurrecting it.”

Frozen Dead Guy Days, which had been held in March each year since 2002 until a two-year hiatus in 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, sprang from a Norwegian immigrant’s efforts to keep his deceased grandfather packed in cryogenic freeze in a Tuff Shed until future advances in medical technology might revive him. It reportedly had drawn 22,000 people to Nederland when it returned last March, complete with its signature coffin races, frozen t-shirt competitions and a dance called “Grandpa’s Blue Ball.”

But as the throngs grew, Martin and Macdonald sparred with the town over a litany of logistical issues including parking, traffic safety, security, waste and especially the impact on Guercio Field, a park where crowds turned March’s melting snow into sod-shredding mud. The pair finally decided a month ago to cancel the 2023 event.

“Strangely enough,” Cullen said, in 2020, when COVID restrictions shut down the festival just days before it was to open, “Sarah and Amanda had already had conversations with the town of  Estes Park, so this idea had actually already been born several years back. It was Sarah and Amanda’s idea; I just happened to capitalize on it.”

With limited parking and space, Cullen said, Nederland just isn’t built to be invaded by 25,000 people. He compared the situation to that of the Burning Man festival, “which was on the north shore of San Francisco for years, but it was destroying the environment there, and that’s why it eventually moved to the desert. This is no different.

“This is one of those things that has grown up,” he said. “It’s a fun, goofy thing that would destroy Nederland if it got any larger, whereas Estes Park is built for that visitor economy.”

Not only can Estes handle 25,000 or even 50,000 people at a time, Cullen said, but “we handle 8 million people a year who go through the intersection there by the McDonalds” where U.S. Highways 36 and 34 converge on the east end of downtown.

“There isn’t lodging in Nederland,” he added. “It’s basically go into town, have a lot of fun and then leave. The town doesn’t make enough money from that to make it make sense. Estes Park has more than 5,800 beds in about 2,700 units. It’s designed for that sales-tax economy lodging business.”

Neither Macdonald nor Nederland Town Administrator Miranda Fisher could be reached for comment Thursday night, and Martin, reached by telephone in New Orleans, declined to comment.

However, Cullen said that “we’ve met with the town of Nederland and they’re on board. I want them to be happy, and I think we’ve made them happy. They’re going to do their own different kind of winter festival, but they’re not going to do anything Frozen Dead Guy related.

“The worst case scenario is if I didn’t do anything and somebody buys Frozen Dead Guy Days and moves it to another state,” he said. “That would be a tragic loss for the state.

“The Stanley as the host hotel keeps it weird,” Cullen said, “and it’s very important to keep this festival weird.”

Frozen Dead Guy Days celebrates one of the weirder chapters in Colorado history — and that’s saying something in a state that introduced the world to cannibal Alferd Packer, Mike the Headless Chicken and Blucifer, the demonic-eyed horse statue that fell on and killed its sculptor at Denver International Airport.

Trygve Bauge, an advocate of cryonics and an original driving force behind an annual New Year’s Day Polar Bear Plunge at Boulder Reservoir, hoped to preserve the body of his grandfather, Bredo Morstoel, in dry ice until technological advances could be invented someday that might bring the man back to life. Morstoel died in Norway in 1989, and his body was first shipped to Oakland, California, where it was preserved in liquid nitrogen for four years, then to Nederland in 1993 — and packed in dry ice in a Tuff-Shed in the hills outside of town.

Bauge’s dream of opening a cryonics facility melted away when he was deported in the mid-1990s after his visa expired. Soon thereafter, Morstoel’s daughter Aud was evicted for living in a house with no plumbing or electricity. But starting in 1995 with Bo Shaffer of Longmont and a team of volunteers, tons of dry ice have been delivered and packed around Morstoel’s sarcophagus, surrounded by foam padding, a tarp and blankets, keeping the body at a steady 60 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

The town does have a law against such things, but according to the festival’s website, Morstoel was “grandfathered in.”

Cullen said his purchase of the festival doesn’t include Morstoel’s frozen remains or the Tuff-Shed that houses him. “Grandpa belongs to the family,” he said.

The festival “actually will be a loss for me,” Cullen said. “My only goal will be to fill the town. I’m honored to have a role where I can help bring these things to this visitor economy. My chief concern is to let the entire town of Estes Park participate in this because after I sell out the hotel, which I do for concerts all the time, the whole town gets a piece of this economy. And unlike Nederland, we can let them stay overnight. No drinking and driving. It’s exactly what this town was built for.”

He noted that the influx of March visitors also will be a boon for the town during its “shoulder season,” when tourist business is only about 10% of what it achieves in summer.”

But above the economic benefits and the boost for workforce housing, Cullen said, is to make the most of the festival’s quirky flavor.

“And what was the last 10 seconds of ‘The Shining’? It was Jack Nicholson, a frozen dead guy, in the maze,” he said. “You just know we’re going to do something in the maze that weird.”