The wooden door creaks open, revealing a coffin-sized recess and a cold, stark wall built of concrete blocks.

Buried 11 feet under the still-green lawns of the Cathedral of St. Helena, the basement door marks the northern end of an obscure tunnel that once connected the church with the former rectory across Ninth Avenue.

Today the tunnel is gone — bricked up if not collapsed — and the rectory serves as the Barrister Bed and Breakfast, where tourists enjoy Victorian-style accommodations, unaware of the Barrister’s history and its hidden link to the century-old cathedral towering above.

“There was a tunnel that crossed under the lawn of the cathedral through Ninth Avenue to the backyard of the Barrister,” said Louis Glouge of the Helena Parish. “It was sealed up many, many years ago, beyond my memory at least.”

Glouge enters the cathedral’s lower level and steps across the Brondel Center (named after first bishop John Baptist Brondel).

With a jingle of keys, he unlocks another door, then warns of the low-flung brace clearing the passage into a storage room.

“We’re under St. Joseph’s Chapel now,” Glouge says. “His altar would be right about there, and these would follow the windows.”

His fingers trace the room’s odd angles and point to the ceiling 15 feet above. “What’s behind us is the sacristy floor,” Glouge adds. “This would come out about where the votive stand is.”

In the back of the room, Glouge finds a door without handles. He pulls it open, presenting a passage to the old tunnel, or what’s left of the old pathway lost to time.

Rumor has it diocesan priests used this tunnel to move from the rectory to the church during bad weather. At times, they might appear to parishioners as if they’d been there all along.

“My understanding was, in the winter, the priest would come under there and come up into the lower level of the church,” Glouge says.

Exactly when the tunnel was dug and when it went out of fashion are hard to say. What is known is that construction on the cathedral began in 1908 with the laying of the giant cornerstone on the church’s northwest corner.

But the Barrister predates the cathedral by more than 25 years. It was erected in the 1880s and occupied by Herman Gans, a clothing merchant who sold fine apparel to Helena’s millionaires.

The Helena Diocese purchased the property around 1920. Priests used the opulent home as a rectory until about 1972, when the Diocese sold the property. Living at the Barrister gave the priests ownership of both ends of the hidden tunnel.

Across the street, the Barrister B&B still fills the corner of Ninth Avenue and Warren Street, just as it has for the past 130 years. The home’s owner, Nick Jacques, has restored the building’s charm through years of tedious care and renovation.

Jacques descends a winding staircase into the mansion’s basement. The light shifts from bright and glorious to dim and yellow. He passes through a second, then third door, entering a cloak room under which he suspects the south end of the tunnel to be.

A former altar boy for the cathedral, Jacques still remembers the home serving as a rectory. He remembers a “persnickety” Bishop Joseph Gilmore (1936-1962) calling him to the rectory, displeased as he was with Jacques’ performance at Mass.

“It was the first time I’d ever been in here,” Jacques said, his face cloaked in the basement’s shadows. “I didn’t know then that I’d end up owning the house.”

In its day, the home was a fancy addition to this early Helena neighborhood. Built in the Queen Anne style, it celebrated the days of opulence and grandeur with its towering entry and warm, stained-glass windows.

“I was always familiar with the house and somewhat in awe of what it stood for,” said Jacques. “Growing up an altar boy, you’re always in awe with the Catholic Church and what it represents.”

If the home predates the cathedral by more than 25 years, one must wonder what existed before the church.

Jacques thinks he knows the answer, but it has nothing to do with the tunnel hidden under his feet.

“There was a mansion directly across from here, toward the back of the cathedral,” he said. “You can see it on the Kessler map of Helena. I’ve also seen pictures of the property across the street, and they show a mansion there before the church.”

Martin Kidston: 447-4086 or mkidston@helenair.com