Est. 1920 · Daytona Bike Week History · Volusia County Road Culture · Florida Biker Landmark
The building at 310 Main Street in Daytona Beach was constructed in the 1920s, originally housing three connected storefronts including a church space, a bar called the Kit Kat Club, and a barbershop. The Kit Kat Club became one of the more popular Daytona establishments of its era, but the owners grew steadily resistant to the motorcycle crowd that descended on Daytona Beach as racing culture grew from the 1930s onward.
Daytona Bike Week itself dates to 1937, when the first Daytona 200 motorcycle race drew competitors and spectators. As the biker presence on Main Street grew, the Kit Kat's aging owners sold to one of their own bartenders, Dennis MaGuire, rather than continue fighting the clientele. MaGuire welcomed bikers, gave the bar a western motif, and named it the Boot Hill Saloon — a nod to the Pinewood Cemetery directly across Main Street. The saloon opened in 1973.
Boot Hill became a landmark of American motorcycle culture, operating through major events including Bike Week, Biketoberfest, and NASCAR race weeks. The venue has been a consistent fixture on Main Street for over fifty years. Notably, the bra of convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos has hung in the bar for years, an artifact that occupies its own peculiar place in the establishment's lore.
Sources
- https://boothillsaloon.com/
- https://thunderroadsflorida.com/article/boot-hill-saloon-celebrates-50-years/
- https://www.floridahauntedhouses.com/real-haunt/boot-hill-saloon.html
Jukebox activating while unpluggedObject movementApparitionsPlumbing anomalies
Boot Hill Saloon sits across Main Street from Pinewood Cemetery, a proximity its own marketing copy exploits. The haunting claims, though, are specific to the building rather than the cemetery: the reported activity reads as the kind of thing that accumulates in a structure that has housed a late-night bar for over a century.
The most frequently cited phenomenon is the jukebox playing unprompted while disconnected from power. Items have reportedly been thrown across the bar by invisible hands. In the restrooms, faucets turn on and toilets flush without human activation. Staff closing the building describe a general sense of presence.
The most distinctive figure in Boot Hill's ghost lore is the 'Woman in Orange' — a flirtatious female apparition said to appear near the front doorway in go-go boots, offer a mischievous expression, and disappear. Floridahauntedhouses.com, which has listed the venue since at least 2016, attributes the building's activity broadly to 'spirits of deceased bikers who refuse to leave their favorite watering hole,' though this is more atmosphere than documented claim. The Kit Kat Club era, which drew a different kind of crowd before the biker years, is the more plausible historical layer behind any named apparition.
Notable Entities
Woman in Orange
