Podcast 359 – Ted Williams’s Frozen Head

In Episode 359 Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger visit Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, to explore the story behind Red Sox legend Ted Williams’s unique afterlife. Though Williams died back in 2002, some members of his family believe that’s just a technicality. Ted’s head and body were separately cryogenically frozen in the hopes of being revived one day when there’s a cure for… death.

Read the episode transcript.

BECOME A LEGENDARY PATRON:
https://www.patreon.com/NewEnglandLegends

CREDITS:
Produced and hosted by: Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger
Edited by: Ray Auger
Theme Music by: John Judd

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST FOR FREE:
Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Pandora | Amazon Podcasts | TuneIn | iHeartRadio

JOIN OUR SUPER-SECRET:
New England Legends Facebook Group

Red Sox baseball legend Ted Williams.

Cryogenics tanks at Alcor – like the container holding the remains of Ted Williams.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
*A note on the text: Please forgive punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Like us, the transcripts ain’t perfect.

[ORGAN AT BASEBALL GAME – CHARGE!]
[BASEBALL HIT CROWD CHEERS]
RAY: It’s summer, and here we are at Fenway Park in Boston watching the Sox. Not bad.
JEFF: Not bad at all. The only bummer is the price of beer.
RAY: What can you do?
JEFF: I can let you buy the next few rounds.
RAY: Yeah right… that’s why we pre-game!
JEFF: Exactly.
RAY: So the Red Sox are just doing okay this year. Their record puts them in the middle of the American League East standings, but there’s still plenty of season left to make up some ground and get into the playoffs.
JEFF: If you could build a Red Sox team from all of the Red Sox players throughout their history dating all the way back to 1901 when they were one of the first eight charter franchises, who would you pick?
RAY: That’s a tough one. I guess I’d have to think of some of the most famous players off the top of my head.
JEFF: That makes sense.
RAY: You’d have to say Babe Ruth.
JEFF: Of course.
RAY: Big Papi David Ortiz
JEFF: No question.
RAY: Wade Boggs, Carl Yastrzemski
JEFF: Yup.
RAY: Cy Young, Pedro Martinez
JEFF: Those are some of the biggest names in the sport. No question.
RAY: Oh, and considering the tunnel that’s just up the road from us on the Mass Pike, you’d HAVE to include Ted Williams.
JEFF: Of course! The legend who once endorsed Moxie Soda, served his country in two wars, and was considered the greatest baseball player ever.
RAY: Imagine if we could put all of those guys on the field at the same time? I mean we can’t. Some of them are dead.
JEFF: Well… not so fast there, Ray. Maybe we can get Ted Williams on the field again one day.
RAY: Dude, he died over 20 years ago.
JEFF: Technically you’re correct. But there may be a loophole there. We’ve come to Boston to search for Ted Williams’s frozen head.
[INTRO]
JEFF: I’m Jeff Belanger and welcome to Episode 359 of the New England Legends podcast.
RAY: And I’m Ray Auger. Thanks for joining us on our mission to chronicle every legend in New England one story at a time. We do that with a From the Vault each Monday and a new episode each Thursday. Most of our story leads come from you, so please reach out to us anytime through our Web site.
JEFF: We’ll go searching for the frozen head of baseball legend Ted Williams right after this word from our sponsor.
SPONSOR
RAY: So Ted is not dead?
JEFF: Well, by the legal definition he’s dead. But his family believes that’s just a temporary status that will change one day.
RAY: That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard.
JEFF: It’s going to get a lot stranger.
RAY: I bet! Let’s start with a little more about baseball legend Ted Williams. He was born in 1918 in San Diego, California. He grew up playing baseball and joined the Boston Red Sox in 1939. Right away he set himself apart. In 1941 he had a batting average of .406 which is crazy. In fact, he was the last major league baseball player to bat over .400 in a season.
JEFF: Think about that. No one has done that in over 80 years of the sport.
RAY: In 1943 he put his baseball career on hold to serve three years in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He came back in 1946 and picked up where he left off. He won the American League MVP award and played in his only World Series. During 1952 and 1953 he returned to active military duty to serve as a Marine combat aviator during the Korean War, then returned to baseball where he played until 1960. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966 which was his first year of eligibility. They called him ”Teddy Ballgame,” “The Kid,” “The Splendid Splinter,” and “The Thumper.”
JEFF: Nicknames were just better back then.
RAY: Right?! From 1969 to 1972 he served as team manager for the Washington Senators and the Texas Rangers. And in 1991 President George H.W. Bush awarded Ted Williams with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
JEFF: Patriot. Veteran. Baseball legend. Moxie soda spokesperson. Ted Williams did it all.
RAY: He did. And we have the Ted Williams tunnel in Boston. The guy is practically immortal already.
JEFF: That’s true. His name won’t be forgotten anytime soon. But he may be immortal in another way too. Like LITERALLY immortal.
RAY: How does one do that?
JEFF: To find out, let’s head back to the year 2002.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: It’s June of 2002. George W. Bush is President. “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton is number one on the radio. Scooby Doo is number one in the box office, and the baseball season is in full swing nation wide. But for baseball legend Ted Williams, things aren’t so good.
JEFF: No, they’re not. Ted Williams is suffering from cardiomyopathy. It’s a heart condition that only gets worse. He had a pacemaker installed in November of 2000, and underwent open heart surgery in January of 2001. It’s now late June of 2002 and the 83 year-old Ted Williams is struggling. They’re bringing him to Citrus Memorial Hospital near his home in Citrus Hills, Florida.
RAY: At 83 years old, he’s led a heck of a life. Even the great ones need to move along sometime. I hope he’s comfortable and not in any pain.
JEFF: I get that. The word is, Ted Williams’s wishes were for a cremation after his death. In fact, a Massachusetts sports memorabilia collector has a hand-written letter from Williams dated December 19, 1991. Go ahead and give this highlighted part a read, Ray.
RAY: It says, quote “It is my wish that no funeral or memorial service of any kind be held and that my remains be cremated as soon as possible after my death. I want you to see that my ashes are sprinkled at sea off the coast of Florida where the water is very deep.”
JEFF: It’s now July 5th…. And Ted Williams takes his last breath at Citrus Memorial.
RAY: There’s a lot of commotion at the hospital right now. People seem to be in quite a hurry considering the man in the room is beyond help.
JEFF: Right, That’s the thing. Though Ted’s wishes were for a speedy cremation, his son, John Henry and daughter, Claudia have a different idea. They claim they convinced their father in his final days, to have his body cryogenically frozen so that when a cure for cardiomyopathy is found, he can be thawed out, and live again. And they have a signed letter to prove it.
RAY: Wait… what now?
JEFF: Have you ever seen a fish or a frog frozen in the ice on a pond or lake?
RAY: I have, actually. As a kid. When the spring comes, they swim off.
JEFF: Right. It’s a kind of suspended animation, except fish and frogs are cold-blooded, and ice is only about 32 degrees. Cryogenics is a whole other level.
RAY: So John Henry and Bobby Jo convinced their dad to do this?
JEFF: They claim they have a family pact signed by the three of them saying they want to be placed in biostasis after their deaths so one day the family can be reunited and live again. Some suspect maybe the kids tricked their dad into autographing something he shouldn’t have signed, but either way, folks are in a big rush to get the body of Ted Williams over to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
[CAR DOORS SLAM]
RAY: They’ve loaded the body of Ted Williams into an ambulance.
[AMBULANCE SIREN UNDER NEXT FEW LINES]
RAY: And now they’re racing to the airport.
[SIREN STOPS / DOORS SLAM]
[JET TAKES OFF]
RAY: The jet is taking his body to the Alcor facility in Scottsdale, Arizona.
JEFF: Time is of the essence when it comes to biostasis. In a perfect world, you’d put the body into stasis while the person is still alive. There’s just one tiny problem with doing it this way…
RAY: Lemme guess… that would be murder.
JEFF: It would. Even if the person consents. If you can’t get the person while they’re still alive, you need to do it ASAP after their death because decomposition starts immediately.
[JET LANDING]
RAY: Once Ted Williams arrives in Scottsdale, his body is rushed into a surgery. There, doctors surgically remove Williams’s head in a process called neursperation.
[SAWING SOUND?]
[QUICK BOILING FREEZE]
RAY: They just placed his head into a container of liquid nitrogen, instantly freezing The Splendid Splinter’s head to just above absolute zero.
JEFF: They’re now placing his headless body into a 9-foot-tall cylinder container filled with liquid nitrogen….
[QUICK BOILING FREEZE]
JEFF: And now Ted Williams is completely frozen where he will remain until there is a cure for… well… death!
RAY: The cost for this unique afterlife experience is $136,000 dollars.
JEFF: What you’re buying is only a theory.
RAY: What do you mean?
JEFF: The crazy thing is that cryogenics have been around since the late 1960s. That’s when the first human corpse was frozen. So far, no one has been able to freeze any animal, human or otherwise, and reanimate it after.
RAY: Then why would anyone ever agree to get this done?
JEFF: The idea is that at some point in the future, they will figure this out, and there your corpse will be waiting to get thawed out and reanimated.
RAY: So this could literally take centuries, maybe even millennia?
JEFF: It could. So Ted Williams is really playing the long game here. Plus, the word is his head cracked open multiple times during the freezing process. So if they ever do have a way to thaw and reanimate, he’s going to look like a Frankenstein monster. And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
[ORGAN AT BASEBALL GAME – CHARGE!]
[BASEBALL HIT CROWD CHEERS]
RAY: So Ted Williams has been frozen for 22 years now, and there’s still no cure for the deep freeze. Or for death for that matter.
JEFF: Funny thing about death is that it’s hard to define. I just gave a talk on death in Iowa last week. I had looked up sone old definitions. In 1768, the definition of death was when the soul leaves the body.
RAY: Okay…
JEFF: Kind of a religious view on it. But as the age of enlightenment settled in and medical science progressed, the next working definition was that death is the absence of life.
RAY: That’s hardly a way to define something. By saying what it isn’t.
JEFF: I agree, but that was more or less the definition of death for the next 200 years or so. It was kind of like pornography, you know it when you see it. Then, in 1981, they finally came up with an accepted legal standard. It reads, quote “An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.”
RAY: Okay, that sounds more accurate to me.
JEFF: Sure, but there’s still problems with it. There are rare cases that fall just outside the definition. Like a person who seems to have no brain function and they’re breathing thanks to machines. The family pulls the plug and disconnects everything, but the body keeps breathing meaning some tiny part of the brain is still functioning. Is that person alive or dead? They can’t feed themselves or do anything. They’ll need to be fed by a tube to keep existing this way.
RAY: I guess some would argue they’re alive but not living.
JEFF: I’d agree with that. And yet our laws state you can’t euthanize a person in that state. Though if they have a living will you could stop feeding them and let them die of dehydration and starvation which seems horribly cruel if the body in question can still feel anything.
RAY: I really didn’t think we’d be coming to a Red Sox game in Boston today to have such a depressing conversation about what it means to be dead.
JEFF: Right?! If you extend that definition far enough… and I should point out that I’m no lawyer… could you say that a cryogenically frozen person who has a chance—even if it’s the most remote chance—of being revived one day, is that person dead?
RAY: I’m sure the step after that is the government saying okay fine, then Ted Williams better keep paying his taxes.
JEFF: Ha! We’ve just jumped from baseball to lawyer ball. The waters get murky for sure.
RAY: I guess the real moral of the story is no matter how bad the Red Sox season is ever going, we always have hope that one day they’ll be able to reanimate old Number 9, the Splendid Splinter and trot him out to save the season.
[OUTTRO]
RAY: And that takes us to After the Legend where we dig deeper into this week’s story and sometimes veer off course.
JEFF: After the Legend is brought to you by our MVPs, our Most Valuable Patrons! Our patreon patrons help us out with our hosting and production costs, our marketing, travel, and everything else it takes to bring you two stories each week. It’s just $3 bucks per month and for that they get early ad-free access to new episodes, access to our entire archive of shows, bonus episodes and content that no one else gets to hear, and discounts on our events and products. If you can help the cause please head over to patreon.com/newenglandlegends to sign up.
To see some pictures of Ted Williams and the cryogenic tanks, click on the link in our episode description or go to our Web site and click on Episode 359.

Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a thing. Plus, it’s free wherever you get your podcasts. Also, it helps us a lot when you post a review for us on Apple Podcasts. Even if you just click on the stars for us in your podcast app. When you spread the word, more strange stories come in and we keep bringing you the weird.
We’d like to thank our sponsors, thank you to our patreon patrons, and our theme music is by John Judd.
Until next time remember… the bizarre is closer than you think.

Liked it? Take a second to support New England Legends on Patreon!