HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
SUU's art gallery, where staff report a third-floor piano that turns lights on and off and plays a tune tied to a student who died before a performance.
351 West University Boulevard, Cedar City, UT 84720
Research updated September 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
The Braithwaite Fine Arts Gallery is generally free to visit during posted hours; confirm current exhibition schedule with SUU.
Access
Wheelchair OK
University gallery building on level, paved campus grounds.
Equipment
No Photos
Southern Utah University's primary art gallery and exhibition space · Part of SUU's performing and visual arts complex in Cedar City · A featured site in local coverage of Cedar City campus folklore
Southern Utah University began in 1897 as the Branch Normal School, when Cedar City residents built the original campus building now known as Old Main. Over the following century the school grew into a teachers college and then a university, with a strong arts program centered on its performing and visual arts complex.
The Braithwaite Fine Arts Gallery serves as the university's exhibition space, showing student and faculty work alongside visiting artists. As a campus arts building with a long history of recitals, rehearsals, and after-hours work, it is one of several SUU spaces that local lore associates with reported hauntings.
Southern Utah University publishes a collection of campus ghost stories on its own website, and the Braithwaite figures in local press coverage of Cedar City's haunted sites. The gallery remains in active use for exhibitions and instruction; HauntBound treats the building's documented role as an arts venue as the verifiable history, and the piano story as folklore drawn from staff accounts.
Sources
Local radio station KSUB describes mysterious piano music said to come from a piano on the gallery's third floor. By that account, a young performer was to play a particular piece but was found dead at the piano with the sheet music still in place, and the instrument is said to play afterward.
Southern Utah University's own published collection of campus ghost stories records a closely related figure, a high-school-aged pianist from the 1930s who is said to have died midway through a song while seated at the piano, after which the same tune was reported playing from an upper floor. The two accounts differ on which campus building anchors the story, and HauntBound notes that detail rather than presenting a single fixed version.
HauntBound presents this as documented campus folklore, not a verified event. No name, death record, or specific incident has been confirmed in the sources, and the student in the story is described only in general terms. The verifiable element is the gallery's role as an SUU arts venue; the self-playing piano and the student's death are reported lore, treated here with care for a young person at the center of an unverified tale.
Notable Entities
Tour the rotating exhibitions at SUU's Braithwaite Fine Arts Gallery during posted hours. The third-floor piano stories are campus folklore tied to staff accounts; the public area is the exhibition space rather than the upper floors named in the lore.
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