Worried workmen bulldozing a former hospital are facing a protest with a difference - after ex-patients staged a picket from beyond the grave.

Demolition expert Phil Massie at first ignored the inexplicable banging that greeted him when he arrived at Grove Hospital, Shardlow, Derbyshire.

But he and his team soon realised they were not alone as they got stuck into
the job of stripping the site in readiness for a housing development.

A gray mist cloaked the building, icy blasts gusted from nowhere, and - most bizarrely - circular lights began floating through the empty corridors.

It is thought the lights are "orbs" - said by mediums to represent the souls of the dead.

That would mean Mr Massie is dealing with an anti-demolition campaign more suited to an installment of the X-Files than an episode of Casualty.

Today he insisted his men were not alarmed but conceded: "I do think all this is happening because we are taking the building down.

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing in the pictures. I'm not a great believer in this kind of thing, but there is definitely something not quite right." Since work began three months ago workers have reported hearing banging noises and seeing ghostly figures flitting through the former wards.

They also claim to have been hit with "ice-cold blasts" in certain rooms and say an unnatural pall often hangs over sections of the Grove.

Mr. Massie, a site manager for Carwarden Demolition, of Ockbrook, Derby, said: "Once they said there was a gray mist covering part of the building.

"Last week some of the lads saw what they thought was someone walking past. They shouted over, but when they went to look no-one was there.

"The more work we do, the more things seem to happen - and the more orbs seem to appear. I have never seen anything like it in my life."

Local psychic Jason Daine, who was invited to visit the site, claimed he was able to speak to a number of disgruntled and bemused ex-patients.

He said: "These people are between our world and the next. I was speaking to a man called Henry, who was being sick in a sink in one room.

"Then a lady called Claire told me she was born in Derby and said she was taken to the hospital because she was too ill to be left on her own.

"So there is certainly activity at the hospital. The next step for me is to get up there with some instruments and find out just how much."

Last year a group of ghost-hunters who traveled the UK in search of paranormal activity recorded similar incidents during a night at the Grove.
Mr Massie added: "It doesn't feel scary - we just get on with the job. But there is certainly something going on - the pictures prove that."

The Grove stands on the site of a former workhouse, originally built in 1816 under the terms of the "Shardlow and Wilne Poor Relief Act".

Following reconstruction work, the hospital opened in 1970 and was used to care for elderly patients recuperating after treatment elsewhere.

It closed in December 2005, with its patients transferred to a new
15-million-pound building at Derby's Derbyshire Royal Infirmary.

Last year developer Miller Homes agreed to buy the site from Derby Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for more than 2.5-million pounds.

Final contracts are due to be exchanged next year, and permission to build 59 homes on the land has already been granted - at least in this world.