Woman reunited with missing wedding dress 32 years later

A woman who had given up hope of ever seeing her wedding dress again after a dry cleaner mix up more than three decades has tearfully been reunited with the garment.

Michelle Havrilla clutched her chest and was left gasping for words when her now adult children gave her the dress as a special gift last week on February 6.

“This is not my dress,” Mrs Havrilla can be heard saying in a video filmed by her son Brian.

With tears welling up as she tears off the paper and notices the dry cleaner’s box, she breaks down before saying “Are you kidding me, you found it?"

For 32 years Mrs Havrilla, of Ohio in the United States, assumed she would never see the dress after it went missing from a dry cleaner in the town of Willowick all those years ago.

The dress was found by a woman named Ame Bartlebaugh, who was searching for her own mother's wedding gown when she discovered the one in her family's storage was the wrong one.

After expecting to find a sleeveless number at her grandmother's house on Sunday February 5, Ms Bartlebaugh pulled out a lacy, tiered dress with a hoop skirt.

Instead of lamenting that her mother's dress was the wrong one, she started a social media hunt to find the rightful owner of the lacy dress and within 24 hours she was put in touch with the Havrilla family.

Mrs Havrilla's son Brian filmed his mother's reaction to opening the dress box, which has been viewed more than 23,000 times on Twitter.

A mother-of-four, Mrs Havrilla first realised her dress was missing in 2013, when her basement flooded and she went to salvage some waterlogged items.

For 27 years she had been holding on to a stranger's dress, and with a broken heart she gave that dress away to charity.

The Akron Beacon Journal reported that Ms Havrilla hadn not moved the box with the dress from her dining room table since it was found last week.

“I’m still in shock,” she told the newspaper. “I never thought I’d see it again.”

After finding Mrs Havrilla's dress, Ms Bartlebaugh is hoping to find her own mother's dress before her wedding next year.