A grandmother has been brought back from the dead twice - and has even survived spending three days in a morgue. The 61-year-old Russian woman has been declared dead twice by doctors, but each time has come back to life - and once was minutes away from being cut open for her autopsy.

Hardy Lyudmila Steblitskaya spent 3 days lying in a freezing cold morgue, while her family mourned the retired cook.

She has scared both doctors, friends, and family once in November last year and in October this year.

The initial confusion began last year, when Lyudmila was taken to Tomsk Regional Clinical Hospital where she spent days because she felt unwell. When her 29-year-old daughter Anastasia, who has a nine-year-old daughter, Nelli, called on a Friday evening to ask about her mother's condition, she was informed by doctors that her mother had died. The devastated woman began planning her mother's funeral and breaking the bad news to friends and family. She spent 60,000 roubles (£1,223) buying flowers, a casket, and arranging for a grave to be dug.

She then went to the hospital to collect her mother's body, only to be told to wait as doctors had not performed an autopsy. She told the newspaper that a startled doctor then approached her and said that her mother was not dead, but was in her bed, breathing and alive.

A disbelieving Anastasia went into the room to find her mother calling her name.

Her mother cannot remember what happened, only that she was in the hospital on a Friday and then woke up in a morgue the next Monday to discover that her skin was peeling off from the cold. Mostly, she is just grateful to be alive and able to see her friends and family.

In October 2012, Lyudmila - who has a history of heart problems - had another "apparent death" during a hospital stay, but this time doctors brought her back to life after several hours.