Wind Telephone: A disconnected rotary phone for "calling" lost loved ones

I can’t speak to my fathers grave: it is disconnected from him, by definition the one place he most certainly never was.

I can’t speak at the sky; I’m not any sort of believer.

Despite our never texting, though, I recently found some great comfort in texting my thoughts to him. Texting is already such an asynchronous form of communication, it didn’t feel like talking to myself.

Apparently the phone company has reassigned his cell number, though. So it really didn’t feel like talking to myself when I got a text back asking me to stop.

I'm wondering whether I should make some recordings (or even train a chatbot) to respond to these type of calls if/when I'm gone. Already, when I go through my past email & chat archives, I see that there is enough there to reconstruct my responses to most day-to-day questions.

But I personally believe that humans forget the faces and voices of departed loved ones over time by design. We're not meant to relive pain but to gradually have the associated memories overwritten by new ones. Our digitally augmented memories are an impediment to completing the grieving process. But then again, I'm a person who feels grief in a very muted form so I'm not really qualified to pass judgment here.

This is reminiscent of the untraceable phone hotline in The Shockwave Rider (the 1975 novel that gave us the term, and idea, "computer worm"). In this case the worm protected the anonymity of the "Hearing Aid" -- you could call that number, say whatever you liked, and at the end someone at the other end would say "only I heard that" and hang up.

The ability not to be overheard is becoming increasingly precious.

I know it can seem a little silly but I know for me, when my Mom passed away I sort of struggled with deleting some voice mails from her. I know I could have transferred them to hard drive but in the end it seemed like the right thing to sort of let the 1's and 0's go off into the ether-sphere along with her spirit.

This American Life had a nice segment about this phone. It's one of the stories on this episode: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/597/one-last-thing-before-i...

Thomas Edison worked on the two-way variant of this: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dial-a-ghost-on-thomas...

There is a 2016 documentary about this by NHK: https://youtu.be/ke-H5EEqvRs

This is not an official channel, but it's completely gone from their website.

Spielberg ruined this for me.

The child Carol Anne in the movie poltergeist could communicate with the spirit world through her child's toy phone.

I can't think of anything redeeming about a spirit phone because of this.

I've occasionally sent emails to a friend of mine who passed... despite getting bounce backs.

> Know Before You Go

Don’t go, leave it for the people who need it

It's like the Wave Organ in SF.