When Bart the cat was hit by a car, owner Ellis Hutson feared the worst. Seeing it lying in a pool of blood on the road, it seemed clear that Bart had been killed.

Hutson, from Florida, received help from a neighbour to bury the animal. "I put him on the shoulder of the road and went and got David. He dug a hole and covered up the cat with dirt. I witnessed him bury the cat," he said.

But, according to ABC News, five days later Hutson was stunned to hear that Bart had turned up in a neighbour's garden.

"I open the door and my neighbour's standing there with the cat in her hand," Hutson said. "She said, 'Bart is not dead.' I said, 'That’s impossible. We buried Bart.'"

The cat is currently receiving treatment for a broken jaw, and will lose sight in one eye, but vets at the Humane Society say he will return home in a few days.

With no Indian burial grounds nearby, Hutson suspects that Bart's resurrection was divinely inspired:

“The only thing I can think of is that this is God’s miracle. And I thought, why five days later? If Bart was alive before, he would have come to our homes earlier. All I can think of is that God created animal life on the fifth day.“