Wind phones provide a tangible way to grieve.
Like many mothers and daughters, Amy and Emily Dawson’s phone conversations include everything from big events to the minutiae of everyday life, but the old rotary phone that Amy calls her daughter on isn’t connected. After Emily died of a terminal illness in 2020, Amy created a wind phone to carry her messages.
It’s an old idea. Gods have been using the wind to relay messages for thousands of years. In ancient Greece, Zephyrus communicated this way, as does the Holy Spirit in Christianity. But the wind phone adds a modern twist with its tangible apparatus. Public wind phones are popping up around the world, giving people a chance to express and process their grief.
“Picking up the wind phone is continuing your connection with that person,” said Amy Dawson, a retired teacher and reading specialist who splits her time between New Jersey and Florida. “It’s a sacred space. It’s a private space. It lets you say the things you need to say, or you want to say. Offloading it into the wind.”
Dawson credits wind phones with saving her life after the sadness of losing Emily at the age of 25. As the owner of the My Wind Phone website, she maps the phenomenon worldwide. So far, Amy has documented 243 US wind phones, 105 internationally, and another 15 coming soon.
1. Wind phone on Two Rock, IrelandEamonn Murdock CC BY 2.0; 2. Windphone in Ridgefield, ConnecticutCourtesy of Amy Dawson
Origins in Japan
I first heard of wind phones in June of 2024 while on a walking tour of Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery. I noticed a wooden box on a post with a black rotary phone inside. “Now you can talk to the beyond,” cemetery tour guide Sarah Ray explained. “And just tell Meemaw all the things that you would like to tell her when you can’t call her on the phone.”
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Girl Scout Troop 10218 installed the Riverside Cemetery wind phone. Browsing the My Wind Phone map, you can see some phones commemorating specific lost loved ones. People are building wind phones in parks, on public trails, and next to hospices.
“Who in life has never felt the need to scream at the sky, or reconnect with those who are no longer there? Here, immersed in nature, it is possible.”
It all started in Japan. Garden designer Itaru Sasaki bought an old-fashioned phone booth and put it in his garden so that he could call his cousin, who died of cancer. He named his phone booth Kaze No Denwa, or the Phone of the Wind. After the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami, he relocated his phone booth to a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near the ruined town of Otsuchi, which lost 1,284 souls in the disaster.
Itaru Sasaki’s Phone of the Wind now resides in Bell Gardia, a garden six and a half hours north of Tokyo managed by Sasaki and his wife. It’s the gold standard for wind phones—in a beautiful, quiet setting and staffed by experts in understanding grief. Grievers and curiosity seekers from around the world visit to make their spirit calls.
A Growing Worldwide Movement
Dawson’s blog features wind phones around the world. In Langebaan, South Africa, you can call late loved ones from the center of a labyrinth on an equestrian estate. A purple wind phone in Willowick, Ohio, commemorates Teddy, a stillborn baby. It’s at child height—one of many popping up around the U.S. to help kids process their grief. A sleek white modern phone booth in Tuscany, Italy, offers a view of the sea. “Who in life has never felt the need to scream at the sky?” creator Podere Tegolaja wrote on the My Wind Phone blog. “Or reconnect with those who are no longer there? Here, immersed in nature, it is possible.”
1. Windphone in Mayfield Green, KansasCourtesy of Amy Dawson 2. Tuscany, Italy 3. Alberta, Canada
A gorgeous setting helps, Dawson says. “Most of them are at beautiful places where they’re quiet, private, and in nature, which I think is important. It allows us to surrender to our grief and express what we need to express.”
But not everybody is a fan. Some residents of Silverton, Colorado, were aghast when Nancy Brockman bought a plot and installed a bright red British phone booth in historic Hillside Cemetery. “It’s overlooking the mountains of Colorado,” said Dawson. “It’s absolutely stunning.” Brockman set up the wind phone while dying of cancer. Her red monument has split the community, many of whom don’t believe the phone booth belongs in a cemetery with National Historic Landmark status. But Brockman, who died in 2024, won the wind phone battle. She and the phone booth remain undisturbed in Hillside Cemetery.
Events are also incorporating wind phones, from suicide prevention walks to Burning Man to the U.S. Open at Pinehurst, North Carolina. The golf tournament over Father’s Day weekend of 2024 encouraged people to call their dads on wind phones and talk about golf.
Shades of Grief
I interviewed Dawson the week after my mother died. Mom was the person I loved most in the world, so grief was very much on my mind. It was therapeutic talking to somebody who understood it. “We live in a grief-avoidant society,” Dawson said. “But you can’t avoid grief. You’ve got to live through it.”
Long a fan of cemeteries and reading about historic funeral customs, I turned to my Victorian Book of the Dead for consolation. The Victorians were the opposite of us in some ways. Unlike people of today, who have vaccines and antibiotics, they were obsessed with death and talked about it freely. Today, we try to act like death doesn’t exist, and instead, we’ll be playing tennis and having sex, wrinkle-free, forever. To do otherwise would be somehow shameful.
“We expect grievers to get back to normal, don’t talk about it, move on,” said Dawson. “I speak of wind phones with bereavement because I’m a bereaved mother. But grief is so encompassing in our life.”
People write to Dawson about their many shades of grief, often centering on regret. Sometimes, it’s what was left unsaid to dead loved ones. But people also use wind phones for other reasons. A man who was getting divorced could tell his soon-to-be ex-wife his real feelings without destroying his chances of having a relationship with his children. A woman who’d lost her way in life called her childhood phone number to speak to her younger self. Somebody else talked on a wind phone about their house being foreclosed. “People grieve for so many reasons,” Dawson said.
Do You Need a Wind Phone?
If you need to talk on a wind phone, check out My Wind Phone’s map and see if there’s one near you. Or if you really have a lot to say, maybe you need a wind phone of your own. Rotary phones are the best because of the tactile and nostalgic experience. But they’re getting harder to find. Dawson recommends garage sales, eBay, Etsy, and Facebook marketplace. Peruse her Create a Wind Phone page for tips about building your wind phone and deciding where to put it.
Amy and Emily Dawson read about the wind phone in Japan together. After Emily died, it seemed like a fitting thing for Amy to create her own private line. “It gave me a way to continue to, in my mind, work with her and be with her and do something in memory of her,” she said. “She’d be all over this. She loved her phone.” Amy firmly believes that she and Emily are working together on this project and helping grieving people from their separate planes of existence.
“Someday I’ll be with her again, and she’ll be like, ‘That was really cool,’” Dawson said, laughing. “That’s what I hope, anyway.”
