Teke Teke
A Japanese urban legend of a girl cut in half by a train who drags herself on her elbows, and the riddles children swear are the only way to escape her.
The story always begins with a sound. Teke-teke, teke-teke. It is the scrape of hands and elbows on concrete. Something is pulling itself along a dark platform. It has no legs. It is the ghost of a girl cut in half by a train, and she is coming for yours.
How to escape Teke Teke
You cannot escape Teke Teke because Teke Teke is not real. She is a Japanese urban legend, a scary story told by schoolchildren. No one has ever been hurt by her. There are no police reports, no victims and no deaths. The “escape” is part of the story, the way a ghost story at camp comes with a rule for staying safe.
The escape rules people tell are borrowed from a related legend called Kashima-san, or Kashima Reiko. The two stories swapped names and rules as they spread, so most tellings mix them. In those versions the ghost asks you a question, often “Where are my legs?” A wrong answer means she cuts you in half. A right answer saves you.
The right answers change from teller to teller. The answer most often given in English sources is that her legs are on the Meishin Expressway, a motorway in central Japan. Another version says you live if you reply “kamen shinin ma”, meaning mask, death and demon. Some say this phrase is where the name Kashima comes from. Japanese versions of the Kashima riddle give other answers. If she asks for your legs, you say “I need them now.” If she asks for your hands, you say “I am using them now.” If she asks who told you her story, you say “Kashima-san.” In a few Teke Teke tellings, simply saying “Kashima” keeps you safe.
There are other rules too. Some versions say she comes within a set time to anyone who hears the story, and the only way to stop her is to tell it to someone else. A popular manga version warned readers that if they did not forget the story within three days, Teke Teke would appear in front of them. The Japanese folklore site Yokai.jp notes that no single weakness or escape is shared by every version. That is the clearest sign of a legend. Every school had its own rule.
The legend
Teke Teke is one of Japan’s best known modern urban legends. The name is a sound word. It copies the tapping and scraping she makes as she drags herself on her hands or elbows.
In most versions she was a schoolgirl or young woman who fell or was pushed onto a railway line and was cut in half by a train. Some tellings say she was bullied. Others say it was an accident. Station staff are often blamed for leaving her. She now haunts stations and streets at night. When she finds someone, she chases them and cuts them in half at the waist, often with a scythe.
Her speed is part of the fear. Some versions say she moves at 100 or 150 kilometres an hour. Others say she moves no faster than a person runs. As with the escape rules, there is no fixed version.
The cold winter version
One well-known version is set in the snowy north of Japan, often said to be Hokkaido. A girl falls onto the tracks and is cut in two. The bitter cold seals her wounds, so she does not die at once. She lies on the tracks crying for help while station staff cover her with a tarp. She dies there, and her anger keeps her spirit on the line.
The Japanese Wikipedia article on Teke Teke points out that this does not work. Cold cannot stop bleeding that fast, even in a Hokkaido winter. A train strike also rarely cuts a body cleanly in two. The detail is there to make the story feel real, not because it is true. Earlier versions of this page gave Teke Teke a witness count and claimed she had been verified. Neither claim had any source, and we have removed them.
Where the story came from
No real accident lies behind Teke Teke. Yokai.jp says the origin is unknown and that no single accident is the source of every version. The name Teke Teke appears clearly in Japanese books of school ghost stories around 1993 and 1994, during a boom in school horror stories. One reader later recalled a similar tale in Okinawa around 1980. Other tellings place her in Hokkaido, Kobe or Kakogawa in Hyogo. The 2009 Japanese horror film Teketeke was set in Kakogawa and spread the legend further.
The Kashima-san legend is older. The writer Ken’ichi Hatsumi linked it to the panic over Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman, which swept Japan in 1978. He saw Kashima-san as a copycat that followed it. In early versions Kashima was often a wounded soldier. Later versions made her a woman who lost her legs on the tracks. That is how she and Teke Teke came to share a body, a question and a set of answers.
Teke Teke is now told around the world on websites, in videos and in films. Like most urban legends, she says more about the people who tell her than about any real event. Trains, crowded stations, bullying and being alone at night are real fears. The ghost gives them a shape and a sound.