I had the privilege, for much of my high school education, to go to boarding school. For a kid who prized independence and adventure, it was a dream. Boarding schools are weird places. Living away from the safety of your familiar routine—and being effectively locked in with your teenage peers—heightens every experience. It heightens the exhilaration; it heightens the drama. It also heightens the spookiness after dark. 

Ghost stories and ouija boards made regular appearances among my friend group, but my school didn’t have any well-established hauntings (cursed rooms, maybe, but nothing in the way of a ghostly personality). Imagine my delight, then, to learn about a boarding school ghost so powerful that she’s become a superstar of Nigerian (and sometimes Ghanaian) urban legend. Tonight, let’s cover that ghost: the beautiful, the terrible, the deadly Madam Koi Koi. 

Links to original tellings throughout.

The stage

Madam Koi Koi’s origin story varies, but many agree that it takes place in a federal boarding school (or Federal Unity College). Nigeria founded these schools in the 1960s, after kicking British colonizers out. Supplied with the best resources and the brightest staff, the schools unified children from across the country and provided them with the best education possible. 

In recent years, the schools have gotten some bad PR. Of special note have been the increasing power struggles between the administrations and their PTAs (this will become important later). The specific campus where our story takes place is not clear, but the incident that kicks things off seems to have happened several decades ago, at the height of the colleges’ glory.

The characters

In the most common telling of our story, Madam (or Lady, depending on who you ask) Koi Koi was a stunningly beautiful teacher—one with a penchant for red. She wore bright red lipstick, a pair of wicked red heels, and nothing but the very best clothes.

Madam’s beauty was surpassed only by her viciousness. She regularly slapped and beat students for the slightest infraction, drunk on the little sliver of power the school had given her over them. Some even say she used a cane soaked in alcohol and alligator pepper to make everything hurt that much worse. 

Needless to say, ole KoiMeister was bitterly hated by her students—the other set of characters in this story. Like a Greek chorus, they seem to have acted as one, with no particular kid standing out. The one exception is the girl that was Madam Koi Koi’s last victim (at least, her last victim in life). 

What set Koi Koi off is not clear, but she outright attacked the poor student, unleashing on her with such ferocity that she punctured her eardrum. With that last, terrible cruelty, Madam unlocked her own doom. 

The violence

From here, the story goes one of two ways.

The first (and most common) is that unfortunately for Madam, her victim just happened to be the daughter of a prominent PTA member. That parent wielded their power over the administration, which promptly fired Koi Koi and kicked her off campus. Outraged by (what she saw as) this terrible injustice, Koi Koi wasn’t paying attention to her surroundings on her way home, and either got into a brutal accident or was mashed under the tires of a hit-and-run. With her dying breath, she swore vengeance on the children whose pleas for help had led her to this end. 

The second version is worse. In that version, it was apparent that the administration would do nothing about Madam Koi Koi’s cruelty. Desperate, the students had to take care of her themselves. In the Ghanaian version of the story (where Madam Koi Koi is called Madam Moke [Moke meaning ‘high heel’]), the students shoved her in a closet and locked her there to die, not realizing that she was pregnant. In another version, the students simply beat her to death, one of them using her red, high-heeled shoe. They then dumped the corpse and walked away whistling, as if nothing whatsoever would come of this.

The ghost

Like any good ghost, you hear Madam Koi Koi before you see her. That’s how she got her name—the koi, koi, koi imitating the clack of her red heels coming closer down the hall. Except that in some versions of the story, it’s not the crisp koi koi at all. Because she died horribly mangled and without one of her shoes, it’s more like koi skkkkkchhh, koi skkkkkchhh as one foot drags on the floor. 

For as beautiful as she was in life, Madam Koi Koi is no longer so easy on the eyes. Not only is her disfigurement enough to drive a person mad; Madam is very vain, and will disappear anyone who dares to look at her. 

Meet her out of bed in the dormitories at night, and she’ll do even worse. She roams the halls, searching for any excuse to mete out the violence she inflicted all those years ago again from beyond the grave. It’s said that she hunted down the students that killed her (if that’s the version you believe) and exacted bloody revenge, but that didn’t satisfy her, and she seeks revenge on students still. 

The only way to stay safe when you hear that koi. Koi. KOI. is to get back in bed, squeeze your eyes shut, and pray that the sounds of her heels pass. If they do, you’d better stay put a long time, until you’re certain that they’ve faded away. 

The legacy

Madam Koi Koi is super popular, almost too popular for this blog. Students trade stories about her to this day; according to one, “if you’re Nigerian, you’ve probably heard this story since birth.”

Iterations of her story abound, and not all of them paint Madam as a villain. One casts her as a mother who died with her child in a bus accident a little ways outside the school. The dead daughter wore a red shirt, so students now whisper never to wear red to bed, because Koi Koi might mistake you for her. Another casts Madam as a rape victim who returned to pick off her attackers. Some even say that Koi Koi was a teacher, but a nice teacher, that her students turned on her and she died in a prank gone bad. 

Regardless of which tale you believe, the story of Madam Koi Koi has an impact. Let’s just hope that she continues to try to surprise her victims on linoleum instead of a carpeted floor.

Which is a worse damnation: burning in hellfire or wearing stilettos? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks to Mwesigwa Joel for the classroom shot, Charles Deluvio for the dark hall, and the good folks at Canva for other miscellaneous images. Featured image by Gábor Szűts.