Teke Teke

A Japanese ghost story about a girl cut in two by a train who moves on her hands. The name comes from the sound she makes.

English Wikipedia sums up the common elements of the legend. Teke Teke is an onryō, a spirit bent on revenge: a schoolgirl or young woman who fell onto a railway line in northern Japan and was cut in two by a train. In the story she survives the accident but dies in pain because station staff neglect her. With no lower body, she moves on her hands or elbows. Japanese Wikipedia says the name comes from the teke teke noise she makes when she moves with her arms.

Atlas Obscura, in a piece on Japan's bathroom ghosts, calls the Kashima Reiko story a toilet version of Teke Teke, since its ghost is likewise a young girl cut in two by a train. In one variant, anyone who hears her story will see Kashima Reiko within a month. Atlas Obscura says readers who know the Ring films will recognise that setup.

Yoshida Yūki, who collects ghost stories, told the Asahi Shimbun's book site in 2022 that people with nothing in common kept telling him about an oddly tall woman in slightly old-fashioned red clothes looking in through windows. He notes that kuchisake-onna also wears red, and that the Kashima-san and Teke Teke stories show the same pattern. Ghosts had mostly worn white, he says, and sightings of a red woman increase from around the 1970s. He thinks it fair to link these figures with child-killing.

Eiga.com lists Teke Teke, a 2009 film directed by Shiraishi Kōji and starring Ōshima Yūko of AKB48. Two schoolgirls hear the sound on their way home from school, and the next day one of them is found dead without her lower body.