Payphone in Arizona provides comfort for those who call

WICKENBURG, Ariz. (NBC, KYMA/KECY) - A phone in Arizona never rings but provides comfort for those who call.

It is a payphone that requires no payment no number of nickels or dimes will ever make it work again but people still use it.

There is a phone in Wickenburg that will never ring.

It is a payphone that requires no payment and no amount of change will ever make it work again, but people still come to the Hassayampa River preserve to use it to say what they need to get off their chest and to say what they waited too long to say.

It has no dial tone because it is a wind phone.

"When you start dialing your person's phone number, there is something about hearing the dial turn back and putting yourself in that space and imagine them there and saying what you need to say it's really powerful," said Amy Dawson, Founder of MyWindPhone.com.

When Dawson lost her daughter to a terminal illness in 2020, she made her own wind phone.

"I needed some way to continue our bond and some way to continue our relationship; I had to keep being her mom. She loved her phone. She was a young woman with special needs," Dawson explained.

Dawson created a website to track wind phone locations. There are four in Arizona, including the one in Wickenburg, which Park Supervisor Chris Matthews has placed.

The idea is the brainchild of Itaru Sasaki, a Japanese man who put a phone booth in his garden in 2010 and opened it to the public the following year after a devastating tsunami killed more than 18,000 people.

Since then, wind phones have appeared in gardens, parks and other public places though.

"I had a beautiful story from a woman whose baby died at one day old and she said, 'I didn't think it was going to help me because of course my baby didn't have a phone,' but she said just being able to offload those feelings, that upset and that anger and that hurt and devastation that I was feeling, put those words out there without putting them on her husband."

Amy Dawson, Founder of MyWindPhone.com

Dawson has also heard from parents who lost their children to fentanyl.

"They are angry at their child for trying drugs. They are angry at the person who provided the drugs...Angry at a lot of different places and maybe it's just not one visit, but maybe it's a few phone calls and they work through those feelings by getting them out there and talking about them," Dawson expressed.

Not all users are grieving the loss of a loved one.

"There are a lot of people that go for loss of job, loss of a relationship...I have heard from someone that had a house foreclosed and they are angry. They just wanted to get it all out. We don't always have that person that we can do that with without feeling judged," Dawson shared.

So if you ever see a disconnected phone in the woods, know that it has a purpose.

"It is not for everyone, but for who it is for, it is so powerful," Dawson remarked.