An album belonging to unidentified western tourists lies in the mud near washed away bungalows on Phi Phi island. (AFP)

Koh Phi Phi (Thailand), Jan. 7 (Reuters): The tourists can still be heard on this Thai paradise isle, only now local people say they are voices from beyond the grave.

Devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami, Koh Phi Phi, a holiday mecca typified in the Leonardo DiCaprio film The Beach, has become an island inhabited mainly by rescue workers and ghosts. ?I heard some foreigners calling out to me last night, saying: ?Come on, come on, come and join our party?,? said Prajit Sumta, a carpenter who is one of the few Thais to have stayed on the tiny island since the killer waves. ?But then I looked round and realised I was all on my own.?

Then he knelt in front of a makeshift Buddhist shrine made of incense sticks in an old beer bottle to pray for the hundreds who died on the island. Holidaymakers are not the only ones whose spirits are said to be haunting Phi Phi?s palm-fringed beaches.

?One of the women who worked in the bank came to me in a dream telling me that her body had not yet been found. She wanted to show me where it was,? Prajit said.

Reluctant to leave his house alone at night because of the spirits, he is still one of the braver ones. Most of the hundreds of Thai residents who survived the December 26 disaster have deserted the island, for fear of ghosts or a new tsunami.

?Everybody has left and they don?t look like coming back soon. They are all scared,? said Roger Lohanan of the Thai Animal Guardians? Association, which has launched a rescue mission for abandoned pet cats and dogs scouring the rubble for food.

Before the killer waves struck nearly two weeks ago, Phi Phi was particularly popular with young backpackers, who came in their thousands to soak up its hippy atmosphere in simple beachside bungalows.

The tropical night air would have been filled with the sounds of young people laughing, talking and drinking. Now its rubble-strewn streets, thick with the stench of death and bonfires, are deserted.

At night, for those starting the long, arduous clean-up in the light of arc lamps set up by the Thai army, thoughts for the dead some feel are waiting in the shadows are seldom far away. ?Whenever I go out at night, I always go with friends,? said Korn Surachet, a 32-year-old electrician. ?Never alone.?