If you've ever considered deleting your Facebook profile to go on a social media detox, this story might convince you otherwise.
After her youngest daughter got engaged last weekend, Shannon McNamara of Franklin, Tennessee, went to go fetch her wedding dress that she had professionally cleaned and sealed 30 years ago.
"We'd always said that when one of the girls got engaged, we would open up my wedding dress, take a look at it, and relive old memories," McNamara told WKRN.
But what she found in the dry cleaning box underneath her bed was a total shock. The dress that she brought home from White Way Cleaners—a local dry cleaning company in Tennessee—wasn't the long-sleeved ivory gown she wore to her November 15, 1986 wedding. Instead she found another ivory dress—just one with short-sleeves and bows decorating the shoulders.
Instead of getting upset, McNamara turned to Facebook at 2 p.m. on Sunday, January 15 in hopes that maybe someone in the Nashville area would recognize the dress and would maybe also have hers.
In less than two hours, one of McNamara's friends responded to her post with a link to an article from 2012 about a Nashville native who went through the same ordeal four years ago.
"I told my husband, 'That is it,'" McNamara told ABC news. "I recognized it right away and we had been at the same dry cleaners."
Kim Jones, the woman who discovered that her dress was missing in 2012, had also dropped off her wedding dress at the now-closed White Way Cleaners after her October 25, 1986 wedding.
This is where this story gets even crazier—McNamara just happens to know the mother of Jones' daughter-in-law. When she saw her Facebook post last Sunday she connected the two women.
"Words cannot express how excited I am that you opened that box," Jones wrote on McNamara's original Facebook post, tagging her daughter Emily who she had hoped would wear the lost dress one day at her own wedding.
"YOU FOUND OUR DRESS!" Emily Jones commented. "You just made one happy mama and daughter! THANK YOU!"
Thankfully Jones—who now lives in Acworth, Georgia—held on to McNamara's dress for four years despite considering getting rid of it at one point.
"I looked at it and thought, 'Well, it's been four years,' and then I thought, 'No, put it back,'" Jones told ABC News. "I felt like eventually [finding the dress's owner] would happen."
After speaking on the phone, the two women plan to exchange their dresses the next time Jones is in Nashville visiting her family.
