Teke teke, teke teke. It is the sound of something coming toward you, low to the ground. When it reaches you, you see what it is: the top half of a woman, pulling herself along on her arms.
Teke-teke is a Japanese urban legend. It is told as a rumour, a ghost story and an urban legend, in several versions. The name is only a sound. It is the noise her hands make as she drags herself forward.
What does it look like?
The sources describe her simply. She is a ghost, or a yokai, with the lower half of her body gone. She moves on her two arms. In the main story she is a woman whose body a train cut into an upper and a lower half.
The story
One version, the one most sources tell, is set in a cold northern region. A woman fell onto the railway tracks, and a train cut her in two.
The cold was so bad that her blood vessels froze and the bleeding stopped. In one telling, the cold made her blood vessels shrink, and that is why she could not die quickly. She lay there suffering and called to the people around her for help. A station worker decided to cover her with a blue tarp. She died soon after.
In this version she hates the people who left her there. She is not looking for her missing legs. She wants to kill.
The twist at the end
The story is built in two parts. First comes why she became a ghost. Then comes a twist aimed at the listener: she will come to anyone who has heard the story.
That second part is the trap. You cannot un-hear it. The manga Jigoku Sensei Nūbē, serialised from 1993 to 1999, turned the legend into an episode. It came with a warning: forget the story within three days, or teke-teke will appear in front of you. It shocked readers at the time, and it still ranks near the top of fan lists of the series' episodes.
Related legends
Teke-teke is sometimes treated as the same being as Kashima-san, another legend that comes to people who hear it.
A similar story is tied to the children's song "Sacchan". It says the song has a fourth verse. In Muroran, Hokkaido, a 14-year-old girl walking home caught her foot in the groove of a level-crossing rail. She could not move, and a train cut her in two. The cold stopped the bleeding for a while, and she died searching for the lower half of her body. A boy who made a joke verse about her was later found dead, without his legs.
Other legends about the same kind of accident were first told separately. In one, the ghost makes the train driver die of shock. In another, a voice is heard at the crash site. The writer Yoshida Yūki suggests these stories, teke-teke and Kashima-san may all have shaped each other.
Could it happen?
Japanese Wikipedia's article on the legend says no, but it gives no source for this. It argues that a northern winter is not cold enough to freeze blood vessels shut. And a train almost never cuts a body cleanly in two.
Teke-teke today
In 2009 two films, Teke Teke and Teke Teke 2, opened in Japan on the same day, 21 March. In the first film, she appears if you cross a pedestrian bridge wearing something red. Look back, and she cuts you in two at the waist.
In 2025 a new TV anime of Jigoku Sensei Nūbē adapted her episode, as episode 6, aired on 7 August.
