HORROR: Mortuary attendant collapses when dead woman woke up and asked ‘where am I?’

An undertaker in Germany passed out in shock when a coffin lid slid open and the woman inside groaned: "Where am I?"

The 92-year-old lady had been pronounced dead hours earlier at a retirement home in the city of Gelsenkirchen and taken to the Munstermann funeral parlour.

But when the funeral director recovered from passing out he saw the old woman lying in the coffin groaning with both eyes open.

An ambulance raced to the scene to take the woman back to a local hospital but she fell ill and died on Monday afternoon.

A police investigation has now begun to probe how she was prounonced dead, even though she was still alive.

According to reports, the woman was found in bed at the nursing home where she lived by a carer, who thought she had stopped breathing.

A doctor was called and they pronounced the woman dead before she was taken away by an undertaker.

When he realised she was still alive, he called an ambulance with paramedics noting she still had a pulse.

She was rushed to hospital and her family were informed that she was still alive.

The head of the retirement home where she lived, but didn't die, Lother Burger, said: 'This is terrible and inexplicable.

'We are being devoured by the press, we are being pilloried.'

The investigation into the incident will decide if there had been a failure in determining a death.