If one travels west on the Olympic Discovery Trail from North Sequim Avenue, across from the Sequim School District soccer field they will come upon a small, open field on their right. Settled against a fence on the west side of the field, one will see a curious structure.

On a small stand, what could be a community book box, or a free food pantry, is a structure which serves a different purpose. Upon closer scrutiny, an old rotary phone sits in a booth. It is a phone with wires running to nothing.

The phone is a wind phone; It’s a device and a space for someone going through a loss to speak to their deceased loved ones.

“It’s a phone for anyone who want’s to use it and it’s not connected to any wires; it’s connected to the wind,” says Diane Fatzinger, who had the phone installed.

“I lost my partner Pam in January a year ago and I could sit in my house and talk to her, or sit in my car and talk to her, but there’s something about picking up that phone and talking to her that’s different.”

Fatzinger and Pamela (“Pam”) Larsen shared 23 years together before Larsen died suddenly from bleeding in her brain in January 2023.

In March 2024, a little over a year after losing her partner, Fatzinger saw something on Facebook that reminded her of wind phones. She recalls that she had originally seen a story about wind phones on a 2021 CBS segment several years before with Pam, and she was moved to tears.

Sequim Gazette photo by Elijah Sussman / Diane Fatzinger holds a photo of her deceased partner Pamela Larsen at her home on June 18.

Recalling wind phones was an obvious prompt to Fatzinger, and soon she enlisted her contractor brother-in-law Lowell Dietz and sister Audree Dietz to repurpose a structure, previously used to sell her birdhouses, into a wind phone. She then found a rotary dial phone and painted the inside of the booth.

Dedicated to Pam, it has been serving as a medium for connection with lost loved ones since March.

“When I’m in the car or in the house, it feels like I’m talking to space, I’m pretty sure she’s out there somewhere,” Fatzinger says.

Connections

“I’m lonely because I miss talking to her,” Fatzinger says.

“She was my best friend, and there’s something about the phone that makes it feel like I’m talking to her, not just to the sky, or the air.”

At first it felt odd, and she doesn’t talk long, but for Fatzinger there is something comforting about it.

“What do I talk about when I ‘call’ Pam? I talk about life,” Fatzinger says. “Daily life. Hopes. Dreams. Joys and sorrows. The feel of the warmth of the sun. The incessant wind. The smell of rain.”

Fatzinger says she cannot see it from her house, and has located it a distance from the trail for privacy. While she doesn’t know what use it has received, there are signs that at least a few have engaged with it somehow. Painted rocks have shown up in the booth, evidencing that it has been visited.

“I thought, ‘this is something concrete I can do, not just for me, but for a whole lot of other people who have loss,’” say Fatzinger.

Sequim Gazette photo by Elijah Sussman / Diane Fatzinger uses the wind phone in Sequim, located just north of the Olympic Discovery Trail on West Hendrickson Road.

Fatzinger is adamant that the wind phone is for anyone. Even if someone is dealing with another kind of loss, like a familial estrangement, they are more than welcome to use the wind phone.

Fatzinger has gained so much value from it herself, using it every night, if only for a few moments. Often she shares details about her day, like how the garden is falling behind, less well-kept than when it Pam managed it.

Following Pam’s death, Fatzinger said, her friends were very supportive, but eventually it started to feel like she needed more support as she was not simply moving on from the grieving process.

“I saw a therapist because I couldn’t cope,” she said. “I went almost a year and started talking to a therapist, and that was probably the best thing I ever did for myself because I thought I was strong enough to handle the loss. I kept working and I couldn’t get over that hump of loss.”

Developed in Japan

Wind phones have become an international phenomenon with hundreds installed across several countries. Many who visit them describing their effect as meaningful.

The first wind phone was installed by a Japanese garden designer Itaru Sasaki in 2010. His cousin received a terminal cancer diagnosis and died after three months.

Following his cousin’s death, Sasaki felt the need to talk to his cousin, but could not simply call him on the phone to talk, so he installed a phone booth in his garden overlooking Ōtsuchi Japan, to talk to the wind.

Sequim Gazette photo by Elijah Sussman / Diane Fatzinger shows painted rocks left by an unknown visitor.

In 2011 the Tōhoku region in northern Japan was hit by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake and tsunami, killing almost 20,000 people. This catastrophe killed at least 1,200 in Ōtsuchi, 10% of the regional towns population. Sasaki’s opened the Ōtsuchi wind phone to the public following the disaster.

People soon began visiting, speaking with lost loved ones, and others began to install their own phones.

The website at thetelephoneofthewind.com catalogues many wind phones internationally and across the USA. It shows the locations of two other Washington wind phones, one in Olympia — featured in the CBS segment — and one in Battle Ground.

Fatzinger recently reached out to register her wind phone on the site, where it should be featured soon.