Would you rent this Lewiston crypt for the evening?

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It even comes with a coffin — that you can sleep in. (Hotel Crypt)

Would you spend the evening in a church crypt?

What if that crypt had held for over a century the remains of the builder and first priest of the church? And the room came with a plush coffin for napping and a television with a selection of horror movies?

If that sounds like a relaxing night, then here’s some good — but really, really weird — news.

Andrew Knight, a 37-year-old Lewiston businessman, is renting out the former resting place of Monsignor Thomas Wallace in the chapel of the old St. Patrick’s Church. It’ll cost you $290 a night — or $410 in October — to spend time in the heart of this church.

The inside of the crypt. (Hotel Crypt)
The inside of the crypt. (Hotel Crypt)

But the macabre lodgings come with a catch: Because of Knight’s business license — and the fact that it doesn’t have a bathroom — you can’t actually spend the full night there. You need to rent out a room in the adjacent Inn at the Agora to get a key to the crypt from 9 pm to 2 am. Rooms in the inn range from $160 to $250.

“What you do in there is your business but you must vacate the crypt by 2 a.m.,” innkeeper Jan Barrett said in a news release.

Knight is taking reservations for August, and he’s auctioning dibs on the first reservation on Ebay. By 2 pm, there were already 23 bids, the highest at $255.

But bear in mind that not even Stephen King would stay in the creepy crypt, according to Knight.

“I actually reached out to see if he might want to be the first customer, but he respectfully declined,” he said.

(A King spokeswoman said the horror author is “turning down nearly all new requests that would add to his commitments as he has a very full schedule.”)

But can you blame him? After all, the room for 102 years held the decomposing remains of the church’s first priest — who asked before his death to be placed in the chapel crypt.

In 2009, the Catholic Church decommissioned St. Patrick’s, and Wallace’s body was moved to Mount Hope Cemetery.

Knight turned the rectory into a hotel last year, and plans to open an events center in the church by the end of the year.

“The crypt itself is creepy as hell,” Knight wrote on the website. “There is a vent on the east wall that was meant to exhaust the gases emitted by a rotting corpse. The gate looks Medieval and even has a lock — I assume it’s meant to keep vandals out, but was it meant to keep a ghost in? And don’t even think about looking underneath the concrete platform that held Wallace’s coffin. This is not some Disney recreation. This is the real thing.”

So would anyone actually want to hang out the crypt?

Knight said he probably wouldn’t, but there are [Ebay] bidders, so I assume a couple of people are interested.”

Dan MacLeod

About Dan MacLeod

Dan MacLeod is the managing editor of the Bangor Daily News. He's an Orland native who moved to Portland in 2002 and now lives in Unity. He's been a journalist since 2008, and previously worked for the New York Post and the Brooklyn Paper.