A disconnected phone sits in a hand-painted box near the Tonaquint Nature Center in St. George, and anyone can pick it up and talk to someone who's gone. Twenty-three-year-old Shaelynn Del Toro installed the so-called wind phone after her uncle died unexpectedly in August 2025, giving grieving visitors a quiet place to say the things they never got to say.
According to KSL News, the phone lets someone dial a number that represents their deceased loved one and speak as though that person were still listening. Del Toro described it simply: it gives you a chance to be able to pick up the phone and dial whatever number that resembles that person. The bench beside the installation went in on Aug. 15, exactly one year after her uncle passed, according to the same report.
A Quiet Corner Near the Pet Memorial
The wind phone sits at the Tonaquint Nature Center, just down from Rainbow Bridge, a memorial for pets who have died. The City of St. George says resident Amy Mugavero proposed the separate pet memorial in early 2023, inspired by the famous Rainbow Bridge poem, and work on it began that summer. The city’s news release describes the proposal. Del Toro received the city’s permission to install the wind phone, and officials responded positively to her request.
KSL reported that Ben Neumann, the city’s assistant director of Parks and Community Services, helped arrange the project and chose the nature center for its quiet setting near the pet memorial. Neumann described the site as a place where visitors can sit and speak freely. The city accepted the phone as a donation and will maintain it.
A Hand-Painted Box With a Hidden Purpose
A family friend built the box that houses the phone, and Del Toro painted it with butterflies and rainbows to represent people who have died. KSL reported that she also added a QR code and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline number for visitors who may be having suicidal thoughts.
What grief research can—and can’t—say
A systematic review indexed by PubMed included 79 studies of continuing bonds after bereavement. The studies identified both comfort and distress among recurring themes; the review said the research has not established whether maintaining those bonds is helpful. The 988 Utah website describes a separate support resource: callers can speak with a certified crisis worker who will offer support and help them make a plan.
Del Toro visits the phone frequently and hopes others will find peace there, KSL reported. She said the installation is open to everyone, regardless of their beliefs or how their loved one died.
An Idea Born in Japan, Now Spreading Worldwide
Wind phones trace back to a Japanese garden designer named Itaru Sasaki, who set up an old telephone booth in his garden after learning his cousin had terminal cancer with only months left to live. KSL reports that the concept originated in 2010, though other outlets tie its spread to the devastating 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, according to MassLive. Sasaki's original black rotary phone, housed in a small white booth and never connected to a line, still stands in his garden at Bell Gardia Kujirayama in Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, per mywindphone.com. The Otsuchi phone now draws thousands of visitors from across Japan, used not just by tsunami survivors but by people who have lost relatives to illness and suicide, as reported by the Japan Times.
MassLive reports that more than 400 wind phones now exist across the United States, placed in parks, gardens, cemeteries, hospices and schools. In Evanston, Illinois, an old British-style phone booth near the 11th hole at Canal Shores Golf Course has become a gathering point for grief, installed with money raised by Mary Leopold's family, who decorates the surrounding area with memorial rocks, according to CBS News Chicago.
The Los Angeles Times reported on several California wind phones, including one at City of Hope in Duarte, where breast cancer survivor Nancy Clifton-Hawkins used it to speak to her mother, who died of pancreatic cancer. The story also described a phone near a roadside turnout in Wrightwood honoring Robert Byrne, whose 1995 disappearance remains unsolved; his sister Laurie Kathleen Byrne created it. In Joshua Tree, Colin Campbell and Gail Lerner built a wind phone after their children, Ruby and Hart, were killed in a 2019 car crash.
The idea is also reaching schools. In Westfield, Massachusetts, Intermediate School counselor Thomas Underwood is working to install a wind phone at Grandmothers' Garden to help children cope with grief, with counselors providing the phone, labor and installation at no cost, according to MassLive's report. The school's grief group, which had 10 children enrolled last year, runs for six weeks between November and May.
Back in St. George, Del Toro's donation gives the community its own version of that same idea — a phone booth with no dial tone, but somewhere for words that still need saying.
