Everyone in my secondary school knew her…the faceless demon which was a school legend. The story goes like this… on many nights, students could hear the sound of “koi, koi, koi” presumably from a woman’s high heel shoes. We were warned that we should never try to find out who she was as she was a ghost and could kill/maim/blind and all that. It was a real scare in my early days. I always wondered where the woman was and all that.
In my JSS1, there was the story of the female student who usually had a new hairstyle each morning. Her hair was always the most beautiful and was always very neat. She usually claimed that a fellow female student plaited the hair for her but because the hair plaiter was an industrious junior student, she preferred to keep her identity secret. This went on for a long time until something happened… a student woke up in the middle of the night and had the scare of her life when she saw that the girl with the most beautiful hair actually removed her head and was plaiting her hair, herself! Geez! That was enough to keep me scared and awake most nights.
(She came at night)
Birds and cats were also known as demons as we were warned that students who were witches usually transformed into them to attend meetings in the night. The birds had their meetings on rooftops and treetops while the cats had the fence. I love animals but that was enough to make birds and cats suspects to me.
The madam koi-koi tail reminds me of the childhood folktale where we were told about the belle of the village who against the warnings of her parents to not marry the handsome man from a very “far away” land, stubbornly married him. What she didn’t know was that the man was a fish who having heard of her famed beauty decided to deceptively marry her. He borrowed every part of the human body he had. On their way to his place after having crossed many mountains and seas, he returned all the parts of the body and eventually swam away from the very shamed, disappointed and horrified girl.
As a grown-up now, I have been told that because parents did not like their children especially female children marrying men from far away places, the story came to be. It was a warning and a deterrent to many girls. Whenever madam koi-koi crosses my mind, I think that the seniors might have actually manufactured a story which could keep students from wandering after dark. It works quite well if you used me as a gauge.
Birds and cats? How about checking “longer-throats” cos people became “possessed” if they collected stuffs from “possessed” people. Well, this is me still pondering through all that I heard. Maybe you have a different take on issues or have seen madam koi-koi?
As for me, I don’t know what happened to madam koi-koi cos I was in that school many years and never found her…she never visited me or anyone I knew. I believe in the supernatural and I believe in the natural but, how did that story begin? I am aware too that the story of madam koi-koi isn’t unique to my secondary school. Matter of fact, almost every school in Nigeria has heard of her. So, how did this “woman” come to be? Who saw her? How did she become this popular?
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