A community-led effort to make contact with the owners of a local self-serve coin car wash has entered its third consecutive year without success, residents report, despite a sustained campaign of notes, voicemails, and posts to community Facebook groups asking if anyone knows who runs the place.

The car wash, which residents declined to identify by street to avoid drawing further attention to it, has been the subject of complaints ranging from a stuck dollar slot (“eats the loonie, every time”) to a vacuum that “makes a noise” to one bay that, by community consensus, is haunted.

“I left a note in the change machine in 2024,” a longtime resident said. “I left another one in 2025. This year I am considering a third. I do not know if they read the notes. I do not know if there is a ‘they.’”

The community’s investigation has been hampered by several structural challenges: no visible signage indicating ownership, no phone number, no website, no posted hours, no mailbox, and a sign by the entrance reading “out of order” that has been there, by multiple accounts, since at least 2022 and which one resident believes “might be the actual name of the business.”

Pressed on whether anyone had considered calling municipal records, all residents indicated that they had not.

“It feels like it would be weird,” said one. “I just want my dollar back.”

A coalition of veteran note-leavers has formed a loose Facebook group to share strategies, which has approximately two hundred members. The group’s stated goal is to eventually reach the owners. Its actual function, members concede, is mostly to confirm that the dollar slot is still doing it.

A second resident has proposed leaving “a really nice note” to see if that helps. Members are cautiously optimistic.