The wind phone in Conestee Nature Preserve helps the grieving dial into healing
I wouldn’t have to look up the number. It was the first one I ever memorized, with the old 704 area code, in the house in North Carolina where I grew up. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say on the wind phone in Greenville’s Conestee Nature Preserve, but a lot had happened since my mom died a few years ago, and there was plenty I was never able to tell her even before then.
The wind phone, an antique-looking black rotary telephone enclosed in a wooden box just off the trail in the park’s Rock Garden area, isn’t connected to any wires. Wires won’t reach the ones you really want to talk to, says Adriana Brooks.
“It’s a way to talk to those who have died,” says Brooks, who, with her family, created and installed the phone. “It’s a place to go to sit with your grief and talk to your loved ones.”
Today, this is the only wind phone in South Carolina, Brooks says, but the phenomenon has spread worldwide since its origination in 2010. In the Tōhoku region of northern Japan, Itaru Sasaki set up a phone booth in his garden to have conversations “carried on the wind” to a cousin who had died of cancer.
In 2011, an earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people in the region, leaving tens of thousands more in grief. Sasaki opened his “Phone of the Wind” to more than 30,000 visitors seeking a connection to lost loved ones. Hundreds of wind phones have been installed around the globe since.
A Call to Heal
Grief specialists suggest that the act of talking aloud to the deceased taps more directly into unprocessed emotions. What comes up can be surprising: sadness, joy, affection, sometimes rage.
“A wind phone gives them the space to open up about their grief,” Brooks says. “It’s a tool that allows them to voice the things they didn’t know they needed to say.”
When she discovered the wind phone trend on social media, Brooks was coming back from intense grief herself. Suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter Ava in 2021, she felt revived strength and hope when she learned she was pregnant again.
So, when Adele Nicole Brooks was stillborn in December 2021, “it was a really hard blow after everything else we’d been through,” she says. “I just couldn’t think that we’d ever come out of that.”
Spending quiet hours in Conestee, “a place of peace and comfort,” helped, says Brooks. “And then I came across the wind phone idea, and thought what a beautiful addition it would be to an already healing place.”
In late August, about a dozen friends and family gathered in the Rock Garden to support the Brookses–Adriana, husband Brad, Ava, now 4, and her big brother, Cameron, age 9–as they dedicated the wind phone to Adele. The installation also honors Adriana’s “Papaw,” the Rev. Dr. Ridley Usherwood, who died in March 2025.
Making a call is simple: Dial a number that you associate with the person you miss. Use the letters on the dial to spell out a name, Brooks suggests, or try the old number of a family home.
Brad Brooks was one of the first to use their wind phone, calling to reassure his late father that he and his family were doing all right. And Adriana Brooks had a message for Adele: “We miss that you’re not here with us physically to experience all the things that we’re doing,” she says, “but you’re always, always with us.”
When my turn came, I held the receiver to my ear. No dial tone, but the breeze had just picked up, so I was optimistic my call would go through. I spun the dial with the first number I ever memorized, then I took a deep breath.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
How to Find the Conestee Wind Phone
Conestee Nature Preserve, Greenville
From the CNP Field Office Entrance at 601 Fork Shoals Road, follow the white trail about ⅓ mile to the Rock Garden.
Coordinates: 34.77421° N, 82.36165° W
Learn more at mywindphone.com.
