The wedding dress of Anna Baker

There is a wedding dress in a museum linked to the story of Anna Baker, a young woman whose father forbade her to marry. The dress is said to move inside its glass case, and the spirits of the young woman and her father are said to haunt the museum, which was once their home.

The story

In 1836 Elias Baker bought, together with his cousin Roland Diller, the Allegheny Furnace, an iron furnace near present-day Altoona, Pennsylvania. Together they made it thrive and business began to go very well.

Elias moved from Lancaster County with his wife Hetty and their two sons, David Woods and Sylvester, to a house near the furnace, and shortly after the move their daughter Anna was born. In 1839 a fourth child, Margaretta, was born, but she died of diphtheria at two.

In 1844 Elias bought out his cousin’s share, becoming sole owner, and hired Baltimore architect Robert Cary Long Jr. to design a new home.

Work began in 1845 but, amid problems and delays, the mansion was completed only in 1849, at a cost of about $15,000. The expense, together with falling iron prices, brought Elias to the brink of ruin, but in the end he got his dream house.

The Greek Revival mansion has three stone storeys and a facade with six Ionic columns. The interiors were extremely luxurious and the Bakers had become one of the richest families in the area. Elias knew it well and always wanted the very best for himself and his family. He lived there for fifteen years, until his death in 1864.

Anna’s wedding

According to legend, Anna fell in love with a young man and the two began planning their wedding. Anna bought a wedding dress, determined to marry as soon as possible.

Unfortunately she had fallen in love with a poor worker, and when Elias found out he opposed the marriage. According to some versions he even bought the mill where the young man worked to force him to move to another city.

He could not bear the idea of his daughter marrying a worker, and not even his wife could change his mind. Anna, desperate, decided that if she could not marry the man she loved, she would never marry at all. She turned down every suitor her father proposed and lived in the mansion with her brother Sylvester, who also never married, until her death in 1914.

Her elder brother David Woods, on the other hand, married Sarah Tuthill in 1851 and had a daughter, Louise. But he died just two and a half weeks after her birth, in a steamboat boiler explosion.

It is said that Anna’s wedding dress was sold to another girl from a wealthy local family, Elizabeth Dysart, who wore it at her own wedding, becoming Mrs. Elizabeth Bell. And instead of pitying Anna, Elizabeth reportedly often mocked her for never having married.

Anna Baker’s spirit

After Anna’s death the mansion stayed closed until 1922, when the Blair County Historical Society leased it and turned it into a museum. In 1941, thanks to a fundraising campaign, the society bought it, and since 1975 the house has been listed on the US National Register of Historic Places.

A wedding dress was displayed in a glass case in what had been Anna’s room. In reality, though, that dress was not hers: it is believed to have belonged to Elizabeth Dysart, of the Bell family, who gave their name to the nearby town of Bellwood.

Many visitors and staff members claimed that the dress moved inside its case. Sometimes it shook so hard that it seemed it might break the glass. Some think it was Anna’s spirit moving it, reclaiming it from beyond the grave so she could finally wear it, while others think she was angry to see another woman’s dress in her room.

Today the dress is no longer on permanent display, because light and pollution were damaging it. But the museum still organizes tours dedicated to the house’s ghosts, which also has a connection to the CBS TV series Ghosts.

The ghost of a young woman can also reportedly be seen in the mansion, believed to be Anna, sometimes wearing the wedding dress, and that of a man, believed to be Elias. Some people even claim to have heard screams coming from the cellar. David’s body, the brother killed in the explosion, is said to have been kept in the cellar’s ice house while awaiting burial.

Other strange phenomena reported in the mansion include a music box playing by itself and the alarm system going off for no apparent reason.

Many claim it is Anna’s restless spirit causing these incidents. Curiously, though, her obituary describes her as a woman much loved by the people of Altoona, sweet and generous. Perhaps, in the end, she was not as unhappy as the legend says.

Sources

• Baker Mansion – Wikipedia
• Waymarking, Haunted Wedding Dress at Baker Mansion
• Roadside America, Haunted Wedding Dress (Gone)
• PA Historical Markers, Baker Mansion