THE next time that John Kerry visits his $4.9 million winter retreat in the Rocky Mountains, he would do well to dust off an old certificate boasting about the building’s illustrious history.

A framed scroll of parchment written in stilted medieval English reveals that the exclusive hideaway he shares with his wife in Ketchum, Idaho, is a dream American vacation home with a difference: it spent most of its 500 years on a farm in East Anglia.

Locals in the village of Elmsett, Suffolk, expressed astonishment last night that the bat-infested old barn that had a reputation for being haunted is only days away from becoming a possible presidential retreat.

The Times has uncovered the remarkable story that never featured in the barn’s promotional literature when it was sold to John Heinz III, the late husband of Teresa Heinz Kerry, now the wife of the Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate, for £45,500 in 1987: it was the setting for a story of family tragedy in which a father and son hanged themselves from its rafters after apparently being driven to insanity.

The suicides of William and John Bull in the 19th century cast such a shadow over Rookery Farm that even today it is said to be haunted by their ghosts. A third family member, Robert Bull, also took his own life, although where is unclear. An inquest after his death concluded that he had fallen victim to the same condition as his brother and father: lunacy.

High in the Idaho mountains, in an exclusive ski resort popular with America’s super-rich and beloved by Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable and Ingrid Bergman, Mr Kerry has, until now, been able to walk across the barn’s great hall, a cavernous 57ft by 24ft room with a 25ft ceiling framed with giant oak beams, oblivious to its macabre past. But his guests — who on previous New Year’s Eves have included Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood and Tom Hanks — might in future think twice about staying overnight.

The owner of Rookery Farm in Suffolk told The Times that she had detected an unexplained presence in the farmhouse on several occasions since moving there in 1992. Julie Hunn, 47, a legal secretary, who lives at the farmhouse with her husband, Andrew, said: “Sometimes you’ll just get a feeling that there’s somebody there or you’ll see a shadow. It’s happened two or three times since we moved here.”

Janet Cooper, the village historian, said: “The tradition has always been that Rookery Farm was haunted. There was meant to have been a number of sightings around the turn of the last century, but there haven’t been any recently.”

Roy Bull, 82, is William Bull’s great-great-great grandson. His family stopped living at Rookery Farm in 1861 and he now lives in Kent. He said that he had visited the farm only once or twice and had never been told that it was haunted. “But it’s interesting to hear it’s now in America. I never thought anything like that would happen,” he said.

Rookery Farm itself is said to date back to 1485, seven years before Columbus discovered America. By 1982, when the barn was put up for demolition by its then owner, John Llewellyn-Jones, it was in a state of dilapidation. In one side of the roof was a gaping hole, while a colony of bats took up residence in the building every summer.

But, according to Edmund Green, who bought Rookery Farm after the Second World War and lived there for 30 years, it was obvious that the barn was special. “It was a beautiful, lovely big barn. I used to keep my hay in it and my old Ford 8,” said the 88-year-old, who left the farm in 1979. “Those timbers were as good as any in the country — they were massive.”

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.

Matthew Slocombe, deputy secretary of the Society of Protection of Ancient Buildings, said that the dismantling of the barn at Rookery Farm, which was listed in 1996, would not have been permitted today. “A barn like that would almost certainly have been listed today. It is a sad loss to English historic buildings and architecture,” he said.

Tragedies of a brutal life on the farm

For William Bull, a tenant farmer on the 155-acre Rookery Farm, life was a struggle — to pay the yearly tithe of £40 and to feed his 11 children. In August 1816, aged 60, he hanged himself in the barn next to the farmhouse. A local coroner recorded a verdict of “lunacy”. Thirteen years later, Robert Bull, his son, 34, hanged himself. The inquest verdict: temporary derangement.

John Bull, Robert’s brother, had nine children. As well as the suicides of his father and brother, by 1844 he had lost two of his sons in infancy, another at the age of 11 and a daughter aged 20. He had also seen the deaths of another brother and sister and, in 1839, that of his wife, aged 30, in childbirth. On January 2, 1855, he hanged himself in the barn.

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