Frozen Head is an improbably jolly podcast about death and cryonics

When Mike Darwin was eight years old, he was passing the home of his elderly cousin in Indianapolis when he noticed cartons of milk and newspapers piled up on her doorstep. Concerned about her welfare, he broke into the house through an unlocked window and found her dead on the bathroom floor. From the condition and smell of his cousin’s body, it was clear she had been there for some time. “I had a real clear view of what death was and I didn’t like it — and I still don’t,” he recalls.

In the new Wondery podcast Frozen Head, we hear how Darwin’s quest to cheat death led him to become one of the leading lights of the cryonics movement in the US. In the 1980s he was president of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which freezes human heads in readiness for a future in which science will have found a way to defrost them and attach them to a younger, fitter body.

In 1987, the company found itself in hot water following the death of Dora Kent, an 83-year-old former dressmaker who, in the last hours of her life, had been moved by her son, Saul Kent, from a nursing home to Alcor’s laboratory. After she died, she was pumped full of preservatives and her head was removed, frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored in a steel and concrete container. When Alcor applied for a permit to cremate what remained of Kent’s body, the coroner’s office suspected foul play and launched an investigation into her death, demanding that Darwin and his colleagues hand over the head for testing. When they refused, the police were called and they were arrested, though charges were never brought. Eventually, a judge decreed that Kent’s head should stay sealed and, three years later, the case was closed.

The series is hosted by Alaina Urquhart and Ash Kelley, the wisecracking duo behind Morbid, the hit anthology podcast devoted to telling grisly true-crime stories. Much like Morbid, Frozen Head knows how to tell a story and delights in the gorier aspects of its subject matter. Certainly, those of a squeamish disposition would be advised to skip the part where Urquhart and Kelley reveal, in fastidious detail, what happened to Dora Kent’s body in the hours following her death — suffice to say, there are saws involved.

There are surface similarities here to another hit podcast, My Favorite Murder, which maintains a jolly, jokey tone while grappling with pitch-black topics. But while My Favorite Murder mining violent crimes for laughs can feel, at best, morally dubious, in Frozen Head, where the subject is cryonics, the tone works well, underlining as it does the madcap optimism, egotism and absurdity of individuals wanting to have their brains frozen in a quest for eternal life. For a podcast about death, Frozen Head is, improbably, a lot of fun.

wondery.com