A 'dead' United States woman has woken up in a funeral home.

Funeral workers in Colombia got a bit of a surprise when a supposedly deceased woman they were prepa-ring for burial started breathing and moving.

The woman had been pronounced dead just hours earlier after she suffered multiple organ failure due to complications related to multiple sclerosis.

But as workers at the funeral home began to apply formaldehyde to her body she started to come to.

Doctors identified it as a case of Lazarus syndrome, an extremely rare phenomenon in which the circulation spontaneously restarts after failed resuscitations.

The woman was returned to the hospital, where she remains in a coma.