Awoken in the night, Logan Mooney’s body is suddenly pressed against the wall of his bedroom by an unknown force. He yells and flails his legs, trying to free himself from the wall, but it doesn’t help. His roommate is startled awake and comes to his aid. The force stops. No one else is in the room, just the two young men filled with confusion and fear. 

Mooney, known by some as “Paintball,” graduated from the University of Tennessee at Martin in May 2025. He joined Alpha Gamma Rho (ΑΓΡ) in the fall of his freshman year and served as both House Manager and in Membership Development. He began living in the house during his sophomore year.

Upon joining the fraternity, he immediately heard about “Jenny”, the young girl who haunts the halls of the frat house, but he wasn’t a big believer in her. By his senior year, after multiple unexplained events, his view on paranormal activity within the house had solidified.

“There’s for sure something that goes on in there,” Mooney said. “It’s too frequent. There’s always too many things going on.”

Two separate structures have occupied the property at 225 University Street in Martin since the fraternity purchased the property in the early 1960s. Residents of both ΑΓΡ’s original house, occupied from 1963 to 1995, and its current one, built between April 1995 and August 1997, have reported strange occurrences, each with their own personal charm. 

The experiences of Eric Bell and Chris Wilson, ΑΓΡ members who lived in the house during the 1990s, both relay that a spirit haunted the fraternity house. Bell claimed the spirit physically touched him in the middle of the night as he slept in his dorm room in 1992. Wilson, all alone in the house one November night in 1993, witnessed a small figure looking out of a bedroom window. After Wilson’s encounter, he ventured to use a Ouija board to communicate with the mysterious being. That night he asked the spirit its name and age while blindfolded. The board spelled out the name Jennifer with the number seven to indicate her age.

Whether one chooses to believe in these accounts is entirely up to one’s personal discretion, but the historical facts remain undisputed.

A young girl named Artis Lee Smith lived on the same property in the late 1880s. She was the daughter of John L. Smith, the first mayor of Martin. She died at seven years old in 1889 and is buried at Yellow Fever Cemetery in Martin. Her cause of death remains unknown.

Many claim that anyone who touches her headstone at Yellow Fever Cemetery will die. Those who have previously tried fixing the unfinished headstone have all passed away or stopped working on it.

Most members refuse to sleep in or go into the house by themselves. Even those who do not generally believe in the paranormal find the house unnerving to be alone in at night.

One of the members who previously lived in the house while attending UT Martin and was present at the Ouija board activity—though he did not participate—is Jason Taylor, a 1997 graduate who was Vice Noble Ruler of the fraternity at the time.

Although he never believed in or personally encountered Jennifer, or as most members affectionately call her, “Jenny,” he disliked staying in the house by himself, like many other members.

“It’s not the place you want to be by yourself,” Taylor said. “There was probably not a minute went by that there wasn’t noises in the house.”

Despite believing that the house was not haunted, he confirmed that there was often weird movement that occurred with no clear explanation.

“Imaginations run wild, but you’d have stuff come on and off…doors opening and close without anybody there,” Taylor said.

Members have witnessed lights turning on and off by themselves, radios and televisions coming on unprompted and doors opening and closing on their own in the house; a few even claim to have been harassed by an unknown being while they sleep.

For Mooney, his first major encounter occurred over winter break while he and two of his frat brothers were staying at the house. They were watching a movie and heard a door open and shut, but they were the only ones in the house. 

“This was probably somewhere around nine or 10 o’clock at night, and we never heard any footsteps inside, and nobody ever walked through,” Mooney said. “We went outside in the parking lot. Nobody was there.”

Mooney says an automatic paper towel dispenser unrolled an entire roll onto the floor, the vending machine tried to give out money when no one was around, and one of the windows, no matter how hard they slam it shut, will still open on its own. 

Mooney shared how in the second semester of his senior year, one of his frat brothers, who lived upstairs, had an equally strange experience where his TV would randomly turn on in the middle of the night.

“He thought people were stealing his remote and turned it on to mess with him,” Mooney said. “[He] completely took the batteries out of the remote, and the TV just kept turning on out of nowhere.”

Mooney’s most disturbing encounter occurred during that same semester when he awoke in the middle of the night, sensing something was wrong; he had been sleeping in his dorm room on the first floor with his then-roommate, Macon Barrow.

“There was something between the clock [and the bed],” Mooney said. “The clock was not showing, and the TV light was right beside it. I couldn’t see it either in the dark.”

He attributed his blocked view to simply being half-asleep, but after the following physical encounter, he concluded that it wasn’t just his adjusting eyesight that hindered him from seeing the clock; there was indeed something, or someone, blocking his view that night.

“It was sometime later. I woke up to the feeling of some kind of pressure on my body that was like almost pulling me, cause my bed was right beside the window, and my back and my head was up against it, and I woke up to this feeling of my body just being kind of sucked to the wall,” said Mooney. “I woke up, and when I felt it, I started screaming. And I was kicking the wall, and I put my arms on the wall. I was trying to push myself away, and it was almost like I just couldn’t go anywhere.”

Barrow eventually awoke from hearing Mooney and immediately checked on him.

“He was trying to make sure everything was okay,” Mooney said. “And when he did that, it’s like there was nothing. I was able to move. I was able to get away from the wall.”

The following morning, both Barrow and Mooney were thoroughly spooked when they looked at Mooney’s photo of a past rope pull team for the fraternity that he had previously thumbtacked above his bed.

“Macon turned around and looked, and the developed picture was balanced perfectly upside down on this thumb tack, right above where I was laying,” Mooney said.

Past paranormal occurrences within the ΑΓΡ house have all been attributed to Jennifer, but Mooney cannot confidently say that Jenny was the paranormal figure that visited him that night.

“I don’t know,” Mooney said. “I just know there was something—I just know there was something that was not letting me have a line of sight to both of those lights.”

Even after this concerning encounter, Mooney isn’t quick to believe in paranormal activities.

“I’m not a big believer in this stuff, but…there’s no denying that something, something happened that night,” Mooney said. “I would normally be the last one to admit that, but I’ll stick by that—always.”

A more recent account of Jenny hails from current house mom Jerrie Conley, whose main purposes are to teach current members proper etiquette, assist with any fraternity activities and ensure the house is a “home away from home.”

Her first year working at the house was in 2011. That same year, she had her first encounter with Jenny, though she had already learned about her from her mother Johnella Childress. Childress was employed at ΑΓΡ during the 1990s and early 2000s and knew about Jenny.

On several nights in 2011, Conley would relax on her couch in her apartment on the first floor of the house, keeping her door open. On those nights when she was completely alone, with each and every door securely locked, she would see a figure drift past her bedroom.

“Everybody’s gone,” Conley said. “And I see this…white. Just pass by.”

After these experiences, Conley started to lock her bedroom door downstairs. She also knows many members who had their own spooky encounters with Jenny.

“I had one boy that was up in the room making copies. And he turned around to walk to the hall, and he felt this presence on his back. He threw those papers in the air and ran screaming down the hall,” said Conley.

There is a running joke among the members about Jenny and her childish ploys. For example, if a member places something down and later finds the object mysteriously moved, they accuse the ghost.

“They blame everything if it’s moved on Jenny,” Conley said. “‘Jenny did it.’”

As to why Jennifer continues to haunt the property, Conley says she just wants attention. She believes her to be generally harmless.

“[A] little sister,” said Conley, “aggravating [her] big brothers.”

Conley is more than familiar with the temperaments of little children; she previously taught first grade, the same age group as Jennifer, at Martin Elementary School. Conley’s account, however, is a stark contrast to the harrowing, physical account mentioned at the very beginning.

Considering the accounts mentioned, it doesn’t seem that Jenny haunts the house for particularly sinister reasons; no one has reported being seriously injured after an encounter. At the end of the day, Jenny is stuck in the body and mind of a little girl, forever confined to the boundaries of the house.

Maybe Jenny is brewing a plan right under their noses as the month of October progresses, patiently waiting for the right guy at the right time to strike yet again  — or maybe she is just the annoying little sister these fraternity brothers didn’t bargain for.