The story always begins the same way. A young woman — some say a schoolgirl, some say a office worker — falls onto the train tracks at a busy station. The train does not stop in time. She is cut cleanly in half at the waist.
She should have died.
She did not die. Not entirely.
Teke Teke is what they call her now. The name comes from the sound she makes — the rapid, rhythmic scrape and clatter of her arms against pavement as she propels herself forward. Her upper body is all that remains. Her intestines drag behind her. Her face, they say, is frozen in an expression not of pain but of rage.
She moves at the speed of a running person. Some accounts say faster.
The danger is this: if you encounter Teke Teke, you cannot outrun her. She has had years of practice moving on her arms and she knows every shortcut, every alley, every dark underpass where the lights have been broken for months. She knows them because she haunts them. Because that is where the lonely walk at night.
If she catches you, she will use the scythe she carries — some say a piece of the metal rail that severed her, others say a simple farm tool she found in an abandoned lot — to cut you in half at the waist. She is not doing this out of cruelty. She is doing it out of a terrible, compulsive symmetry. She wants you to understand what she felt. She wants company in her condition.
There is a variation of the legend, told in Hokkaido, that adds a detail: she can speak. She will ask you, in a voice that is somehow both childlike and ancient, if you have seen her legs. The correct answer is unknown. Both yes and no have reportedly ended in the same outcome.
Another variation says she only targets those who are alone after midnight. This has led some teenagers in Osaka to dare each other to walk the old train district roads solo after 12 AM. A few have not come back. The local police attribute this to accidents. The train company has not commented.
The station where she died — the specific station varies by telling — is said to have unusually high rates of unexplained equipment malfunction. Signal lights that change without command. Emergency brakes that engage on empty tracks. Conductors who refuse to work the late shift and will not say why.
In 2003, a transit worker in Kobe filed an incident report describing a figure he saw crossing the tracks at 2:14 AM. He described it as the upper half of a young woman moving at great speed on her hands. He was placed on psychiatric leave. His report was sealed.
If you are walking alone at night and you hear a sound behind you — a rapid, rhythmic scraping, like knuckles on wet concrete, getting closer — do not turn around.
Running will not help.
Teke teke. Teke teke. Teke teke.
She is already halfway to you.