Bride Opens Preserved Wedding Dress 3 Decades Later and Is Shocked by Her Discovery

More than 30 years after her wedding, Tulsa bride Tammy Gaddis made a discovery she never expected: the carefully preserved wedding dress she had stored away since the early 1990s was not hers.

Gaddis married her husband at First United Methodist Church in Oklahoma and had her gown professionally sealed and preserved in 1992. Recently, she decided to take the dress out of storage as her daughter prepares for her own wedding this summer. The plan was to repurpose parts of the gown so her daughter could incorporate it into her big day. Instead, the moment the box was opened, Gaddis knew something was wrong.

“My daughter and I opened it because she’s getting married this summer, and we were going to have it repurposed into something she could use and wear on her wedding day,” Gaddis told News on 6. “When we opened the box, I immediately knew that it was not my dress.”

While the gown inside the box shared a few similarities with her original dress — including a heavily beaded bodice — key details didn’t match her memory. The most obvious difference was the train.

“This one is very full, and it has a train that’s attached,” she explained. “My train was detachable. It came off, so I knew it was not my dress.”

As she tried to trace what might have happened, Gaddis learned that the Tulsa business responsible for preserving the dress decades ago has since closed. Now living in Maryland, she has no direct way to track down records from the preservation process and is turning to the public for help.

“I have gone through a roller coaster of emotions,” she said. “But right now, I am really hopeful that somebody may have my dress — and this may be their dress.”

Gaddis believes the mix-up may have happened during preservation and is encouraging other brides who stored their gowns in gold Keystone preservation boxes to double-check their contents.

“There were multiple layers of the preservation,” she explained. “So you can open the box and there’s a cellophane window inside, and it’s still preserved inside. So, you can check to see if it is, in fact, your dress.”

For Gaddis, finding her original gown would mean more than simply recovering a lost item. She had hoped to give the dress new meaning by passing it down to her daughter.

“It would mean the world,” she said.