The Halloween constituency
-- a group that is seldom pandered to, but this year anything goes -- will be happy to hear that Democrat candidate John Kerry has a haunted barn in one of his wife's properties.

Instead of being demolished, the barn was sold to the Sussex-based Heritage Oak Buildings and was dismantled timber by timber. It was kept in storage until 1987, when a brochure from the company’s agent in New York was sent to Serena Stewart, an architect working for John Heinz III, the wealthy Pennsylvania senator.

“Jack Heinz was a bit of an Anglophile, and I showed the brochure to him and he went nuts,” Ms Stewart said. “There was a slide presentation in New York and there were five barns, and Jack picked one of them.”

After being rebuilt in Idaho, it became one of John Kerry’s five American homes, worth a combined $33 million (£18 million), following his marriage to Teresa Heinz in 1996, five years after the death of her husband in a plane crash.

THe Bad Hair Blog was unable to reach the Kerry campaign to find out what costume the junior senator from Massachusetts will wear next Sunday.

Update: Chrenkoff and The Bad Hair Blog, both at the forefront of trend-spotting? Should the trend catch on, Kerry will start campaigning at cemeteries to appear lively