The hotel was old, built in the eighteen thirties by a gambler on the edge of Blackhawk tribal lands in northern Illinois. little is known about this fella but legend has it that he lost it in a card game to a French fur trader turned gambler named Henri Lérue in eighteen forty two. Henri was a third generation trapper from Louisiana who had come north to get out of the bayou and 'all the damnable critters' that lived in the swamps. He brought with him a Creole woman known as Madame Coe, who was rumored to be a voodoo witch. As the story goes, the Frenchman had won a great deal of money and wagered it all in a hand of five card draw. The unfortunate gambler who owned the hotel put down the hotel itself to cover the wager feeling exceedingly confident that his hand which consisted of a straight flush of hearts to the Jack. When Henri turned over his cards revealing his own straight flush, all spades to the Ace, they say the gambler went flew out of the place and went to hang himself. No one can say for certain as his body was never found. What is certain is that after that night it was Henri Lérue that owned the place and Madame Coe became a permanent fixture in a room in the back. Thr hotel did a modest trade but the bar was always full of hard drinkers and gamblers with Henri himself in attendance every night. People began to come in to see Madame Coe to have their fortunes told or to purchase one of her 'roots', or charms for good fortune in love or money. It was said that good luck followed Madame Coe, which was certainly true for Henri Lérue.

Madame Coe was Creole but what she practiced was neither Voodoo nor was it witchcraft. She had been married to a Conjure man down south and so tended to use the jargon but what she did was something else entirely. When her husband had been found hanged in the swamp she fled to avoid the same fate. She ran into Henri trapping in the marsh and he offered to take her with him up north as he had grown tired of trapping and trading in fur, and besides, the lands that would become the Confederacy in the not too distant future he found hostile to outsiders, even a Frenchman such as himself, he reasoned that life closer to what had until fairly recently been New France would be more welcoming. He never even suspected that these notions had been put in his head by his new companion.

What Madame Coe practiced was mind control. She could read people's thoughts and even overwrite those thoughts with her own. Of course she never admitted to that, she was much more comfortable to be thought of as a Voodoo witch.