DORSET Police were asked to deal with five ghosts and reports of a UFO within a four-year period but residents can rest assured - there have been no reports of vampires or zombies!

Figures obtained as a result of a Freedom of Information request asking about call-outs to all the above, and reports of the supernatural, have revealed that all but one of the calls came from the east of the county.

In July 2016 a person in North Bournemouth called the police to say they had seen two ghosts 'which they were going to kill'. The caller had dialled 999.

Police received a similar call in October 2013, when a person rang from East Dorset to complain about suspicious activity in a house with 'objects being moved' and said it was possibly a ghost.

In July 2015 a caller in the east of Bournemouth rang officers to let them know they thought the police themselves may have been 'in contact with the spirit world to contact a ghost that would come to the caller's flat'.

And in October 2015 a caller from north Bournemouth rang to say that he hoped 'the ghost of his Victorian sister from another life' would visit and take the caller to heaven. Police suggested this caller dial 111 or call the Crisis Team but the caller hung up.

In October 2015 police in Bridport were asked to attend a report of a ghost having broken into the caller's home.

No officer attended any of these incidents and neither did they attend reports of a UFO in the Purbecks in which the caller said they had been looking at UFO sightings when 'someone knocked on his door - not suspicious, just a passer-by.'

Reports of the supernatural and hauntings are not uncommon in the county, however. It was recently revealed that the first recorded sighting of a UFO took place, 285 years ago, with the person reporting it named as Mr James Cracker.

The term UFO didn't become common until the 1950s but on December 8 1733, Mr Cracker, of Fleet in West Dorse,t saw a silvery disc fly overhead in broad daylight. He wrote:

“Something in the sky which appeared in the north but vanished from my sight, as it was intercepted by trees, from my vision. I was standing in a valley.

“The weather was warm, the sun shone brightly. On a sudden it re-appeared, darting in and out of my sight with an amazing coruscation.

“The colour of this phenomenon was like burnished, or new washed silver. It shot with speed like a star falling in the night.

“But it had a body much larger and a train longer than any shooting star I have seen."