by JL Shioshita —
Picture this: it’s late Saturday, and you’re heading home after a fun night barhopping in LoDo. You closed out your favorite drinking hole with your closest friends and now patiently wait at the nearest light rail station for the next train to carry you home. You still feel buzzed—pleasant and soft at the top of your skull—but the chilly night air has started to sober you up, and your warm, soft bed has never sounded better. Your breath frosts in the air, and you puff out your cheeks, blowing a stream of white steam into the night sky as you dream about your comforter and cat and sleeping in late the following day.
An odd sound catches your attention while you wait for the train to arrive. It’s a faint scurrying noise (teke teke). You look around, but the platform is empty. An eerie mist has settled over the tracks, and the overhead light flickers ominously. On the opposite platform, through the fog, you notice benches, a trash receptacle, and a pile of litter on the floor. Then, as you stare in disbelief, the pile rises from the ground and begins moving toward you in a strange, lurching motion. There’s a metallic glint, and that same noise is repeated (teke teke). You stare in shock.
It wasn’t a pile of litter, perhaps an animal of some kind? You try to retreat, but it’s too late. The shape bounds across the tracks faster than humanly possible. A powerful gust of wind blasts past you, knocking you to the ground. When you look up again, the thing is gone without a trace. You attempt to lift yourself, but your legs won’t work. Your stomach feels abnormally wet and warm, and when you look to your side, you notice your bottom half lying motionless beside you.
How did that get there? you wonder in disbelief. It’s the last absurd thought you have before you die.
Welcome to Legend Tripping, where we explore urban legends from around the globe. Our inaugural trip finds us in Japan for one of my all-time favorite creepy characters. Right up there with La Llorona and Kuchisake Onna, Teke Teke is a vengeful female spirit straight out of your worst nightmare. In most versions of the legend, she’s an innocent schoolgirl who was tragically cut in half by a commuter train after accidentally falling onto the tracks. No one knows her original name, but we do know her ghostly form now forever stalks the location where her brief life was cut too short.
Now, Teke Teke is not your regular, everyday, normal, vengeful spirit. No, this girl has a more physical presence to her. She straddles that fine line of modern urban legend, classic onryō, and folkloric yokai so common in Japan—not just a ghost, but a physical, supernatural creature, this one hellbent on terrorizing any unsuspecting victim unfortunate enough to stumble across her deathplace. You see, she never did find her lower half after that train accident, now all that remains is her bisected upper torso. With no legs to locomote her anymore, she’s forced to drag herself across the cold pavement on her hands and elbows, creating the iconic “teke teke” sound that gives her, her name. Armed with a deadly sickle, she slices her victims in half so that they too match her gruesome injury. Caring is sharing, I guess.
This legend is the perfect mix of gruesomeness, ambiguity, and real-world location that gives it that hint of maybe it could be true reality. For me, there’s something about trains and death and hauntings that goes straight for the gut. Whether it’s the classic story from Texas about the ghostly school children pushing stalled cars through railroad crossings, the little boy who was murdered and laid out across the tracks to make it look like an accident, or the haunting last selfie of three girls as a train roars behind them, unaware of what is about to unfold, there is much history and much horror to be had on the tracks. The Teke Teke legend leverages this wonderfully, coupling it with the sensory cue “teke teke” sound that’s right up there with Kayako’s death rattle from The Grudge movies, and you’ve got the perfect combo ready to unnerve anyone finding themselves at a train station alone at night. So, the next time that’s you at the station, commuting home from a long day of work or wrapping up a night on the town, and you start to hear a strange scurrying sound like something dragging itself across concrete, well, it’s probably already too late. Say your prayers because you’re a goner.
HWA Colorado 