Have you met my girlfriend? She's a mummy...

A man claimed that an 800-year-old mummy was his "spiritual girlfriend".

Delivery driver Julio Cesar Bermejo kept his long-dead companion Juanita inside a food cooler bag at his home in Peru.

He said: "It sleeps in my bedroom with me. There's my bed, the TV set and next to it, there's Juanita. I take care of it. It's as if it were my spiritual girlfriend."

Experts say that the body was between 600 and 800 years old and that it was that of an adult male rather than a woman as Bermejo had assumed.

The mummified male is thought to have been more than 45 years old at the time of his death and Bermejo had put the remains in a bag to show them off to his friends.

He added that it had been owned by his father but did not reveal how it had ended up in his possession.