Alice March walked down the cobblestone street, her little brown backpack bobbing along with her. She stopped in front of the towering white church. She looked at the guidebook in her hand, then at the church, then around at the people on the street.
She walked past the various groups of tourists sitting on the stone stairs in front of the church. No one looked at her.
Except one.
“scusami bambina,” The man with olive skin and a dark mustache asked.
“Oh,” Alice beamed at him, “You can see me!”
“Yes,” he said. “From one ghost to another. But you look lost.”
“Well, I am sort of… I’m Alice March,” she said.
“Piacere di conoscerti, Alice March. I am Gregorios Adamos. Perhaps I can help? What are you looking for?”
“Who. It’s who I’m looking for. I’m looking for Michelangelo.”
“Oh my dear child, you would be better off in Rome where he lived most of his life.”
“Yeah, I thought about that. I went there first, actually. I didn’t find him. But I’d read that he’s buried here at Basilica of Santa Croce and thought I would come see.”
“Ah,” the man said smiling and waving a finger at her, “You’re quite smart, little girl. Why are you looking for Michelangelo?”
“I want his autograph,” she said, pulling her autograph book out of here backpack.
The man regarded her curiously. “You are looking for autographs?”
“Yes,” she said brightly.
“But… you’re dead?”
“I am. I never had a chance to travel in my life,” she explained. “Now I can go anywhere, and I meet a lot of really interesting ghosts.”
“Perhaps you would like my autograph then?”
“Maybe, Mr. Adamos. I don’t know what you did.”
“Yes, my contribution to civilization is rather lost to history, I’m afraid.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I,” he paused for dramatic effect, “Was the first to milk a cow.”
Alice stifled a laugh. “The first to milk a cow? Really?”
“The first!” he declared solemnly.
“What about other animals? Goats? Sheep?”
“Copycats!” he said dismissively. They knew of the greatness of Gregorios Adamos and they wanted in their part! But everyone knows cow milk is so much better!”
“What made you think to milk a cow?”
“Well…” he started, “It started out as a joke. And it went badly… and then it went really well!”
She stared at him for a long moment. Then she pulled her autograph book out of her backpack and said, “Could you draw a little cow next to your name?”
“Of course,” he said, and opened to a page with a little room. Beneath Albert Einstein and squeezed between Joan of Arc and Leo Tolstoy he signed “Gregorios Adamos” with a flourish and a little smiling cow with little horns and – crucially – heavy udders.
“Thank you, Mr. Adamos,” she said taking the book back.
“You are very welcome. And good luck finding Michelangelo. He was a great man, sure…. But was he responsible for you having milkshakes?”
I knew about the original wind phone. After his cousin died of cancer, Itaru Sasaki installed an old phone booth in his yard in Ōtsuchi, Japan. He would go there to “talk” to his cousin, though he made it clear it wasn’t a literal communication; talking on the physical handset connected to a telephone in a phone booth made him feel still connected to his cousin, helped him grieve… or commune.
The next year the earthquake and tsunami that famously devastated Fukishima also laid waste to the low-lying areas of Ōtsuchi. The town lost ten percent of its population that day, with more than fourteen hundred either dead or missing. Following the disaster, Sasaki opened his wind phone up for everyone to use. And more than 30,000 people from the Tōhoku region and beyond have visited.
I also knew that a number of similar wind phones have shown up around the world: after the Ghost Ship Warehouse fire in Oakland, an artist set up a wind phone nearby. On a mountainside outside Dublin, Ireland. Most recently, I read an article about a wind phone (just the phone) installed in a copse of pine trees off a ski trail on Aspen Mountain in Colorado. The artist (who remained anonymous because it’s not legal to build a shrine in a National Forest) said he did it to honor those who died in this pandemic.
So, when I read about a wind phone way off trail in the King Range National Conservation Area along the Lost Coast, I was intrigued. Since I read about Sasaki’s original wind phone I’ve always wanted to visit. After losing my mom a few years ago, though, that desire to visit felt like a burning need. I can’t explain it…
No, I can explain it. She and I were close… only we weren’t close. That is to say, we operated on the same weird frequency; no one else in the family got our dumb jokes or references to movies that only we appreciated. But being on the same frequency meant not feeling the need to always be physically present.
So, I wasn’t there when she died.
My sister was. Unlike ours, their relationship was very push-pull and filled with nettle-like stings in a field of poppies. They got along… until they didn’t. But anyone will tell you she’s the more responsible daughter. When Mom retired she moved in with Dawn and her family in their immaculate house in Portland. Dawn took care of our mom, right up until the end. And, Well, beyond as well – she was the executor, too. A role she handled with automaton-like efficiency and detachment. A year later when I visited and broke down crying about mom, she chastised me to get over it. “You weren’t even here.”
If mom and I were on the same frequency, Dawn is the opposite phase.
Dawn wouldn’t understand the Wind Phone. I know this because we talked about it. In 2017 a storm blew the roof off Sasaki’s phone booth. When I was visiting Dawn at one point I read an article about how carpenters from the area volunteered their time and materials to repair the phone booth – many of whom had used it themselves after the Tsunami.
“For a phone booth? Connected to nothing? Why?” I tried to explain. She wasn’t even listening. “It’s on his property? Oh no. No, no, no, no.” She clucked her tongue, “That’s a waste. A waste.”
I thought of that exchange as I bounced along a partly-flooded, deeply rutted forest road. I’d recently replaced the shocks in Aldebaran (my trusty ’98 4Runner) and hoped nothing else would give up the ghost as we jostled and crawled into the wilderness.
“look over there, just at the edge of that bluff,” Jaycee said pointing. Standing on the fire lookout high above the forest floor I traced the focus along the bluff line until… there it was. A phone booth. Not just a phone. Not a rough approximation of a phone booth. It was a complete metal-and-glass phone booth like you would have found in any city twenty years ago, complete with accordion door.
“Holy shit,” I said. “And it just appeared there?” Jaycee was the first person on the backpacking forum to notice this wind phone. She had been the resident of this Forest Service fire watch tower for months.
“Yeah. I haven’t left this tower for more than a couple hours since last June. The nearest trail is…. there,” she pointed towards a bluff much closer to the tower. “Anything that big and heavy I would have noticed.”
“Shit, I hope so!” I said staring at the phone booth perched overlooking a cliff and the seemingly endless ocean beyond. “Like those silver obelisks that were showing up during the pandemic?”
“Something like that, I suppose.”
“Have you been out to it?”
“I went out there two days ago.”
“And?”
“First, it’s a pain in the ass to get to. You can’t head straight there because that ravine cuts between us,” she pointed. “So you’ve got to get back in the woods… I’ll draw you a map. Come on…”
I trained the binoculars on the phone booth one more time. “What happened?”
“On the hike?”
“When you picked up the phone?”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Nothing…. But it was peaceful.”
I nodded and turned to follow her inside.
Jaycee was right – it was a pain in the ass to get inland of that ravine where you could get across it without ropes. I left Aldebaran and made my way through the forest. There was no trail, but I could roughly make out where Jaycee had bushwhacked her way through a few days earlier. Up a rise I could hear the ocean distant, but unmistakable. A little further and the trees gave way to the bluff and ahead of me was the phone booth.
I stopped and stared at it. I’d wanted to visit Sasaki’s but I didn’t anticipate ever getting out to Japan. The others seemed… I don’t know… There was a Northern Exposure episode (Mom and I loved Northern Exposure) where Chris tells Joel he’s building a trebuchet to fling a cow to create a “pure moment” of art, only to discover that Monty Python had flung a cow in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And there’s no point in repeating what’s already been done – it’ wouldn’t be a pure moment. Those other Wind Phones were in the right spirit, but their creators weren’t creating out of whole cloth.
But this one? There weren’t any creators, none that made any logical sense. This thing literally appeared here. That’s original. That’s not possible. And yet… I was staring at it not a hundred feet away. Part of me wanted to turn around. But most of me was already in motion and I crossed the distance in a determined stride.
I pushed the little handle on the accordion door and it opened with a creak of metal on metal. I stepped inside and admired the black phone with its steel-covered wire to the black handset hung in front of the keypad. I stepped back out and looked at it, expecting it to vanish in front of me.
It didn’t.
I walked around the phone booth. No wires. No footsteps in the soft ground either; the soft wind-blown grass around the phone booth waved in the gusts, untrammeled.
I stepped back into the phone booth and closed the door. I took a deep breath and picked up the receiver and slowly brought it to my ear.
Silence. Heavy, persistent silence.
Tears filled my eyes.
I spoke. “I love you, Mom,” I said as the tears started to roll down my cheeks. “I miss you.” I let the tears fall unabated. I let a wracking wave of grief sweep through me like the surf so far below. The booth shuddered as a gust of wind blew up from the sea, whistling through cracks in the booth.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Mom,” I cried. “I’m so sorry. So sorry, so…” I wept openly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there…”
“You were there,” I heard her voice. “You were always there, baby. You are always with me and I’m always with you.”
I smiled.
The tears still came, but I had nothing more to say. I set the receiver back on the hook, opened the creaky accordion door and stepped out onto the grassy bluff. I started down the hill to the forest. Before I entered the trees I looked back but I didn’t see the phone booth. It might have been still there on the bluff but I was too far down to see it. Or it might have disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived. I sniffled, smiled, and didn’t feel the need to check one way or the other. I started back into the forest towards Aldebaran.
The transparent figure floated through the basement and stopped when it saw someone on the couch. It moved closer slowly, menacingly… “Alan?”
The similarly transparent figure on the couch looked over his shoulder. “Oh, hey Tony.”
“What are you still doing here? There’s haunting to be done! It’s October, you know? Veil between our world and theirs is thinnest? Maybe you’ve heard of it? Got to get haunting while the haunting’s good,” Tony made ghost jazz hands.
“Wow. That’s a lot, Tony.”
“Come on, man, it’s October. Let’s get out there!”
“I know, I know… I’m just, I don’t know, not feeling it tonight. Wait, what are you still doing down here?”
“Me? Oh, forgot my ghost boots.” While he had initially come through the room completely silently, now Tony started walking very deliberately and the distinctive sound of booted footsteps echoed loudly with each step. “Do you love them? Listen—” he held still. “They totally heard it upstairs!” He bounced up and down and clapped his hands. “They’re going to come down here and investigate and…” he noticed Alan had gone back to zoning out. “Whoa, Alan! Snap out of it!”
“I’m sorry, Tony. I don’t know what’s gotten in to me. I really love October. It’s just… I don’t know, I’ve been going through a lot lately. There was that whole thing at the cemetery…”
“Oh, that’s right, they moved your grave… That’s tough.”
“Right? What’s a dead guy supposed to do when that happens?!”
“Haunt them!” Tony’s eyes lit up.
“Tony,” Alan sighed exasperated, “Everything isn’t solved by haunting.”
“No, but you feel better afterwards! Do you want to haunt the guy who re-sold your plot or the gravediggers?”
“Tony, come on, you’re not listening… I mean, what’s the point?”
“The point? The point is to make that pencil pusher in a black suit pee himself. That’s the point!”
Alan pinched the bridge of his nose. “I just feel, I don’t know… like I’m a ghost of myself…”
“Alan,” Tony said seriously, “You literally are a ghost of yourself.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Alan said. “It’s been a while since I died… I’m just having issues accepting it.”
“It’s been five years, man,” Tony said. “That’s like a significant anniversary. An excuse to haunt the crap out of the living!” Tony stared off in the middle distance, “I remember when I was five… I mean, that was a long time ago…”
“Last year, Tony. That was last year. You’ve been dead six years this year.”
“Oh… yeah. Well, that was 2020 and that really counts for, like, ten years.”
“Look, go out without me tonight, Tony. Raise some literal hell. Hopefully I’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“Come on, man,” Tony wouldn’t give up. “I’m worried about you! Come on, let’s go do something you like… hiking, right? Let’s go scare the shit out of the deer again! That was fun! They all scattered and then we appeared in front of them again and they took off in the opposite direction. That was so cool!”
“Until that one darted out into traffic and that kid hit him…”
“Oh… yeah… forgot about that,” Tony said quietly to himself. “But then we partied with that ghost deer for the next week!”
“Tony,” Alan said firmly, “Go. Just go.” I’ll go out tomorrow.
“Fine,” Tony said defeated. “I’ll go. But I’m going to hold you to that going out tomorrow bit!”
“That’s fine,” Alan said.
“Oh, and I’m going to stomp up the stairs with my ghost boots because who doesn’t love a dramatic exit?!” The stairs creaked as he slowly stepped up each step, his footfalls echoing loudly in the dark basement.
Alan was alone. And not really enjoying it. He sighed and decided to go upstairs – not to haunt, just to see what the guy living up there was up to. He found him sitting in front of his computer, screen showing a Microsoft Word document. The page on the screen was empty except for the title which read, simply “Ghost Story.” The man in front of the computer let out a sigh of frustration that Alan could totally relate to. The man checked his watch, stared blankly at the screen again, then sighed again…
“Ghost story?” Alan said to himself. “I’m suddenly interested,” he said moving to the bookshelf and forced his will into pushing a hardback book off a shelf and landed with an enormous clap in the silent room. The man in front of the computer jumped and stared at the book on the floor, his breathing rapid, his face a mask of terror.
“My muse…” Alan said and blew cold air on the terrified man’s neck.
