A rocking horse with a haunted past has sold at auction for £1,750, nearly six times its £300 estimate price.

It went under the hammer today (Sunday) at Canterbury Auction Galleries and went to a museum of the occult in Las Vegas.

The dapple grey horse was made possibly by Lines in the early 20th Century, and sat on turned pine supports and a trestle base.

It was once the property of a leading medium Dick Godden, who held seances in his Folkestone home in the 1970s.

Since then it was thought to move from room to room by itself. Its spooky story attracted great interest worldwide.

Mr Godden’s great-granddaughter Kelly, who inherited the antique, said: “One day my great-grandma Irene came home to an empty house and the horse had been moved into the middle of the living room.

“She assumed one of my cousins had been playing on it but it turned out that they hadn’t been near the house.”

Next, both great-grandparents returned home from work to find the rocking horse in the hallway – again, no one had entered the house all day.

During one trance, Mr Godden raised the spirit of a little girl named Angela – and she admitted to playing on the horse.

She would also hide a certain knitted toilet roll holder doll the family had. It would disappear and be found in various places, once on a shelf above the stairs so high an adult would be unable to reach.

Kelly, 36, now of Ashford, said: “I remember going from our home in Hampshire to visit my great-grandparents when I was about seven. It was a three-storey house and the top bedrooms always felt quite eerie. I remember feeling uneasy going up and down the steep narrow staircase on my own to the top floor where the horse was kept.

“We have had the horse since my daughter was a baby, it’s why my grandad (Dick’s son) gave it to me, but she has never been drawn to it or interested in playing on it.”

Kelly’s mother was also into spiritualism: Kelly was just 15 when she was introduced to her first séance. But she renounced it when she became a Christian and is the main reason for rehoming the horse.

She said: “I’ve never seen the rocking horse move rooms.

“However, the horse lived on the landing and there would often be the sound of someone walking around upstairs.

“On more than one occasion I would hear a huge bang from one of the rooms upstairs. Thinking it was something falling off a window sill I would rush up there and absolutely nothing would be out of place. It did make me wonder.

“I couldn’t put it up for auction without telling people its history, just in case it went to a family with children. I thought it might be good for someone who runs a spooky escape room!”

Dick Godden investigated the paranormal in Folkestone in the early 1970s.

He investigated frequent sightings of an apparition inside what had been the Electric Cinema on Grace Hill, Folkestone, which is now flats.

In 1945 a young boy had been killed in the building by an extractor fan falling from the roof.

A book by another paranormal investigator, Andrew Green, said Mr Godden’s probing finally paid off. The temperature dropped, a row of seats slammed down by themselves and he saw a woman gazing into the stalls, touching her right eye now and again.

The sister of the boy who had been killed later produced a picture of their mother, who had been with the boy at the time of the accident. It matched the phantom Godden had seen and she reported that her mother suffered from an affliction of her right eye and frequently rubbed it.

He returned with a group of friends who all witnessed a “black shapeless mass” too.