The old student nursing quarters at the Rockhampton Base Hospital are a well known sight to residents, but not for much longer.

The building will be coming down over the next week to ten days to make way for a new entrance to the emergency department.

Peter Moss the Redevelopment Project Manager at the Base Hospital says the original building dates back around 60 years.

"The building was planned and constructed just after the second world war. It originally housed up to 120 student nursing staff. In more recent years we haven't had that number of staff in it and it's been used predominantly for storage and for some limited administration uses."

"We actually undertook an extensive study of the possibilities of retaining the building some years ago and because of the strong construction of the building it proved to be too difficult and not cost effective to try to refurbish the building but we very much would have liked to have kept it if we could have."

"The Australian Country Hospital Heritage Association has received many of the old plaques from the building, any memorabilia from within the buildings has gone to them as well and they're in the process of setting up a museum at the Heritage Village and they're actually using the old nurses' quarters from the old Mt Morgan Hospital to set their museum up in."

Peter Moss is expecting that when the bulk of the demolition starts, using a "dragon-like" piece of machinery, there will be quite a few curious on-lookers.

"The major part of the demolition will commence over the next couple of weeks and will go for about a month to six weeks. The main method of demolition will be an 85 tonne excavator which looks a bit like a big dragon and will actually just munch the building down from one end to another."

Costing $77 million and with a completion date of late 2010 - early 2011, the emergency department should come on line within the next twelve months.

"The building makes way for the entrance to the new Emergency Department for the hospital. There will also be some additional car parking there and then we hope in the future, a new 150 bed ward will go in that area. So out of this redevelopment we will get another 20 additional beds and refurbishment to a number of areas like our rehabilitation unit, our maternity and pediatric units, our renal dialysis unit and quite a few others."

Peter Moss concedes the demolition and then building works happening at the hospital will cause some disruption, but he says it will be worth it in the end.

"All our services will be available at all times but the problem is going to be accessing the hospital and we recognise that the public are going to be inconvenienced through that and we very much appreciate their on-going patience with us during this time. At the end, they'll have a much better facility here."

Some staff at the Rockhampton Base Hospital are wondering what will happen to the rumoured resident ghost in the old student nursing quarters now that the building is being demolished.

Staff at the hospital say it's common knowledge that odd things happen in that building, and Leanne Horwood the Acting Team Leader of Payroll and Establishment at the hospital says she had a spooky encounter when she came into work early one morning.

"I was working early one morning, I had come in to catch up on some work and the first thing that happened was I heard noises down the corridor. I then went and investigated after it had gone on for a while and I couldn't see anything around. I came back and was working at my desk when the next thing, a glass flew off the desk behind me and smashed on the floor. So I cleaned that up and I thought 'I didn't touch the bench.' After about 5-10 minutes a Christmas tree that was on top of a cupboard flew across and hit the door on the other side of the room and there was no window open so there was no breeze blowing. My next experience was when I went to the toilet and when I came out I was standing at the wash basin and a toilet roll came flying out of the toilet which was not in line with the wash basin, so it had to come out around a corner and it landed at my feet."

Leanne says the first incident made her feel uneasy but it was the two further occurrences that had her thinking she might not come back to work on her own again.

"When the glass happened I thought 'maybe I did knock the bench', but when the Christmas tree went flying across the room I thought 'I don't know what's going on here'. Then when the toilet roll happened it wasn't until I went back later and I actually realised it wasn't in line and thought 'it's a bit scary' so I'm not staying by myself up there after dark anymore."

This isn't the first example of eerie occurrences in that building, apparently administrative staff have found that settings on typing equipment were often changed over night and there is a strange scent noticeable as well.

"I told one of the cleaners and then other people came and told me about two nurses dying there, so I don't know how true that is, but we've had incidents where we can smell really strong perfume just in one part of the room. It would be just in one room and you couldn't smell it anywhere else." Leanne says.