Holly the cat has become an internet sensation, mystified animal experts [and used up an unknown number of her nine lives] by trekking 200 miles home after disappearing on a family road trip eight weeks earlier.

Exhausted and emaciated, barely able to stand and too weak to miaow, the cat appeared from nowhere on New Year's Eve in the back garden of a Florida family home.

For six days, Barb Mazzola and her children put out food and milk for the nervous animal, eventually coaxing her inside their house in West Palm Beach.

They fell in love with the cat, a tortoiseshell with distinctive black, brown and ginger patterning. But when Mrs Mazzola took it to the vet, she reluctantly asked if the cat had an implanted microchip that would identify its original owners.

She did. And it turned out her name was Holly and that her owners Jacob and Bonnie Richter lived just a mile away.

But what was truly remarkable was that they had lost Holly two months earlier when she bolted out of their mobile home on a trip to Daytona Beach – 200 miles north along Florida's Atlantic coast.

How Holly, a house cat who rarely ventured outside, managed to make it to back to her hometown from unknown terrain so far away has baffled animal behaviourists.

It has also turned her into an internet sensation among feline aficionados and spawned countless theories about how sights, sounds and smells, an inner compass or some memories of the drive north may have guided her homeward odyssey.

"It is a complete mystery," said Marc Bekoff, a University of Colorado professor who specialises in animal behaviour. "She may have had some basic sense of direction and then got clues from sights or sounds as she got closer, but the truth is that we have no idea how she got home."

What seems certain, judging from the state of its paws, is that it walked home by road and pavement, rather than somehow hitching a lift or going cross-country. Its back feet, the ones that cat use to propel themselves, were swollen, rubbed and raw and the claws were worn down to stubs.

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(Agencies)