Great-granddaughter of medium looking to sell ‘haunted’ rocking horse
The seller says she can’t pass the item on without warning prospective owners of its ‘paranormal’ past.
A woman is selling a rocking horse she claims can move itself from room to room.
Owner Kelly declined to give her full name to local press, but says she is the great-granddaughter of renowned spiritual medium Dick Godden.
The mum-of-one recalls her great-grandmother telling her stories about returning home to find the 20th century toy, a wooden grey dappled pony, located in a completely different part of the house to where she’d left it.
Raised in a spiritualist family and taken to her first séance at just 15 years old, Kelly is now a devout Christian and works as a holistic therapist.
Even so, she says she often hears banging upstairs while she is working, and adds she’s uncomfortable passing the item on without warning prospective buyers of its ‘supernatural’ past.
Mr Godden routinely held séances at his home and believed a little girl named Angela, whose spirit he claimed to have summoned from beyond the grave, would play with the toy.
Kelly 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.
‘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.’
She added: ‘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’m sure some people will think I’m crazy but I just feel uneasy having it about the place, especially as my daughter isn’t interested in it.’
The late Mr Godden was well-known as a paranormalist. During the early 1970s, he investigated purported apparitions at the Electric Cinema in Grace Hill, Folkestone, of a boy believed to have been killed by a falling extractor fan in 1945.
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