If you like your festivals weird and wacky – think coffin racing, costumed polar plunging and ice turkey bowling – then the Frozen Dead Guys Days event is for you! Running from 7 to 9 March 2014 in the heart of the USA – Nederland, Colorado – hosts what is quite possibly, the weirdest festival!
What is Frozen Dead Guy Days?
This delightfully quirky festival was established in 2002 and for three days each March, the small town of Nederland (northwest of Denver) is overrun with thousands of visitors celebrating the legend of Bredo Morstoel. Back in 1989 a Norwegian man living in Nederland learnt of his grandfather’s death back in Norway and brought Grandpa Bredo Morstoel over to the US whilst preserved on dry ice. He then stored the corpse in liquid nitrogen until 1993, before constructing his own cryonics facility to install Grandpa within the mausoleum, once again on dry ice. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the house has no electricity and fears were raised of the body thawing out. This caused uproar locally and led to the new “Keeping of bodies” law. Thus the Frozen Dead Guy Days was born.
What happens?
The curious travel in from all over the world for the three day festival which involves crazy events and a fair amount of beer drinking too! Events include coffin racing, the frozen salmon toss and the annual parade of hearses, where the top three can win a cash prize. There is also polar plunging whilst in costume, frozen t-shirt contests and brain freeze contests. There is also free live music all over the weekend and a special appearance this year from the Frozen Dead Poets Society! If you have the energy left, check out the ice turkey bowling and snowy beach volleyball.
A word of warning though, at a height of 8,230 feet in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, Nederland is pretty chilly in March! More info on the official website: http://frozendeadguydays.org/
Image credit; Jerry Lewis via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0
