There was an eerie chill as the final tour of High Royds hospital took unsuspecting guests to the mortuary.

It was one of the main talking points for staff and residents attending a special hospital tour and made more creepy by the fact that they would be the last to step inside.

Since October 8, 1888, Menston has lived in the shadow of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum.

The tour offered people the final chance to have a historic tour of the vast site and to catch a glimpse of the once self-sufficient community.

The empty courtyard of buildings at the rear of the hospital was once a hive of activity housing the butchers, bakers, laundry, dairy, cobblers and upholsterer.

Now it is boarded up awaiting the next stage of the development to be turned into office blocks.

Sue Greenwood, who was a student nurse at the hospital from 1972, remembers how High Royds provided them with everything they needed.

"I remember all the shops and we would even grow all our own vegetables here and there was a farm and animals," she said.

"I got my first job here and I lived in the nurses quarters on site, it was a hive of activity. The patients once were responsible for working in the garden but the Government stopped it in the 1960s because it was exploitation."

The hospital still retains its grandeur from its original stained glass window in the entrance hall to the Italian mosaic floor with its Yorkshire rose centre piece.

The famous ballroom, which hosted weekly staff balls and annual pantomimes, has now lost its spark following the deterioration of its roof.

But the room is still prestigious with its grand theatre and stage and four impressive fireplaces, once fabulous chandeliers hung from the ceiling and silent films were shown there.

The hospital complex is a maze of corridors and the tour incorporated the modern church, some wards and the outer buildings.

Mrs Greenwood recalls hearing the wails and screams of patients in the night and her first death in the wards.

"I had only been there a short time when I had to deal with my first death," she said.

"I had to take the patient from one end of the hospital on a stretcher outside and push them to the mortuary and then in to the fridge. It was very daunting, but that was what was expected of you."

The mortuary is outside the hospital and is kept locked, but for one last time the hospital volunteers opened the vault.

The mortuary was small and on entering it you would first be confronted by the fridge and then shown to the viewing room.

Volunteers prised the fridge door open to reveal a cold dark box, which could hold up to nine bodies, it had last been used in February 2002.

At the rear there was a stone slab where autopsies were once carried out, the room once had a viewing gallery for staff to observe procedures and three adjourning rooms where organs were kept.

Today it is a cold desolate place, made even more menacing by the sign outside saying 'Mortuary, One Way'.

The institute once housed single mothers and their children and shell shock victims after the Second World War.

It presently has five wards still open and the remaining patients will be transferred to the Mount Hospital, Clarendon Road, Leeds, on February 25. The fixtures and fittings inside the hospital are due to be auction on March 20.