Electric shock treatment and patients scrubbing floors are one woman's memories of a psychiatric hospital soon to close.

The colourful history of High Royds Hospital at Menston will be lost forever next year when its doors finally close in spring.

The institute is currently in the process of being sold and the future of the site is unknown.

The 115-year-old building hides many secrets and intriguing tales - some of which former High Royds nurse Gwen Hartley has shared.

Described as a self-contained village the hospital grounds stretch for more than 200 acres and it was even serviced by it's own railway line.

Originally called the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum it opened on October 8, 1888, and was hailed as state-of-the-art, with all of its wards facing southwards.

It was the third one to be built in West Yorkshire and could accommodate 1,440 patients.

The self-sufficient complex had staff quarters, wards, sick bays, a laundry, coal storage, a sweet shop and two padded rooms.

More intriguingly it had a ballroom, a large Italian mosaic floor with a Yorkshire white rose in the centre and a theatre.

The hospital would hold dances each Friday night for two hours for the patients and it was covered in the Wharfedale.

During the Second World War famous comedians and actors would travel to the hospital and perform for the troops and patients in its theatre.

It had a cinematograph for showing silent films, which was replaced in 1932 by one for talking pictures.

Mrs Hartley remembers how she would have to scrub half the mosaic floor with six patients from her ward and they would meet up in the middle with the patients from the adjourning ward.

"I remember that after breakfast we had to get some patients, pick up two buckets and go through the back yard to where the coal was dropped off and we would carry it back to the wards to light the fires," she said.

"The wards had stone floors. There were no warders so we had to do everything. I used to have to take six patients to scrub the floors with soap.

"We had to bath the patients once a week and cut their hair and nails. It was jolly hard work."

The wards were heated by coal fires and were lit by gas lamps.

When it was meal times three patients would be taken to the kitchen and would then have to push a trolley of food back to their ward.

Mrs Hartley said the windows on the wards only opened two inches and some patients would use the spoons to try and unscrew the windows to escape.

She experienced numerous incidents of patients escaping, despite the complex having tight security then with every door locked after a nurse entered and left a room.

In one incident a patient had made it as far as Middlesbrough before been caught and another escaped during an afternoon walk and scaled the guttering and hid on the roof. It was three days before someone noticed.

When Mrs Hartley began working there in 1924, the hospital took a guinea out of her wages for living accommodation, all nurses were expected to live in-house until they had been there three years.

The wards would take 64 patients then and during the war the number rose to 100, Mrs Hartley would have to work from 6am to 8pm.

The 100-year-old added: "There are only 24 in a ward now, sometimes we would have 100. Some people had to be locked away. In the doors there were two holes, we would look through one at the patient and shine our lantern through the other."

Electric shock treatment was introduced at the hospital in 1943 and received some positive results.

"It was quite frightening," said Mrs Hartley. "I would have to hold the feet of a patient whilst a mask was put over their head and they would shake as if having an epileptic attack.

"You got used to it after a while and it did seem to work."

It got its own graveyard in 1905, behind the ambulance station on Buckle Lane, only two headstones mark the site where 2,858 pauper lunatics were buried.

In 1963 the hospital changed its name to High Royds and in 1989 the 19th century lunatic asylum received grade two listed status. The hospital has been designated for closure under plans to modernise mental health services in Leeds. It was initially set to close in 1997, but today it is still caring for patients until its future is finalised.