Warning, dear reader. As surely as money is green, business can be horrifying. A young Realtor encounters a body on a gray Sunday evening. A gun-toting cowboy makes a major withdrawal. A house comes alive, shaking its lone inhabitant out into the yard. The following tales are true yarns spun from some of Augusta's business leaders. Light a candle, curl up in a blanket and read on. But keep the phone handy. You just might need to call your mama.

Somebody's home

Gwen Fulcher Young thought nobody was home. She was wrong.

The owner of Gwen Fulcher Young and Associates Real Estate Co. was just a rookie Realtor at the time.

She had arrived at the Martinez home with an associate to preview the property and meet with the client.

"Nobody came to the door," Ms. Young remembers.

She thought he was gone, but the TV was on and so were the lights. She entered cautiously, calling out "Hello?"

Nobody said "hello" back. As she rounded the corner to the kitchen, she found out why.

The man was lying on the kitchen floor. Dead. He apparently had been lying there for days.

"His eyes were sunken back in his head," Ms. Young said.

Ms. Young ran out of the house, and her associate ran in to see what was going on. They both decided to call the police. The coroner arrived and declared the obvious.

"I was quite unnerved," Ms. Young said. "Despite all that, I kept trying to sell his house."

The hitchhiker

Five years ago, Woody Merry embarked from Augusta to Atlanta on business. The financial planner had a "very important meeting" with his largest client in Atlanta and his CPA and corporate attorney.

It was a meeting not to be missed, but fate worked against Mr. Merry. At the Interstate 20 Greensboro exit, his car just stopped - a breakdown.

"With no time to spare, I had to make a snap decision on how to get there," Mr. Merry said.

That's when he put his thumbs to work. Despite the horror stories he told his children about hitchhiking, he did it anyway. Thumb out, he got a ride almost immediately. That driver, however, took him only part of the way. Two hitches later, Mr. Merry made it to the meeting - unscathed.

"At age 47, I hitchhiked to Atlanta, made the meeting and made the sale!" Mr. Merry said.

For those faint of heart, don't think he took his chances hitching back home. Oh, no. This time he rented a car.

Stick 'em up

Augusta in 1977 didn't constitute the Wild East, let alone the Wild West, but one criminal tried to change all that. Taking a nod from Jesse James, this man stepped into the Georgia Railroad Bank & Trust branch on Walton Way dressed as a cowboy, with a gun in hand.

Harry Vaiden III, now a senior vice president at Georgia Bank & Trust Co., was the bank's manager at the time.

"He looked like the Durango Kid," Mr. Vaiden said.

The cowboy walked in, approached a teller and made off with a "small five-figure amount."

"As I remember, the teller fainted as (the robber) walked out the door," Mr. Vaiden said.

The "Cowboy Bandit," as he was named, got away that day.

The house that trembled

Erick Montgomery, the executive director of Historic Augusta Inc., experienced a possible haunting early in his career.

He landed a house-sitting gig in a huge 1850s white-column mansion in Thomasville, Ga. The people lived in Alaska, and they trusted him to watch the place. Little did he know the place might have been watching him.

Because of his work, he spent a lot of time in old buildings, but had never experienced any ghosts or apparitions.

"I don't feel their presences. I've never felt them," Mr. Montgomery said.

That night, the whole place started rumbling and quivering, as though it had come alive. Mr. Montgomery thought he was experiencing paranormal activity.

He ran outside and stared at the house for a while until he decided he felt "ridiculous" and went back inside.

On the 11 o'clock news, there were widespread reports of similar vibrations. The news reporter said that it was a sonic boom caused by an aircraft, Mr. Montgomery said.

Blame it on the gremlins

Rhian Swain-Giboney, a self-described pack rat, saved all her e-mails. That was before "wickedly insidious gremlins" deleted them overnight, sending the office of RedWolf Inc. into temporary chaos.

"The uber-gremlin had devoured the last six months of e-mails. All client work orders, ads, file attachments, everything - consumed without even a bloodied bone left in sight," Ms. Swain-Giboney said in a statement.

Nothing was salvaged, and the president of the marketing and design firm had to call the clients and get the information again.

It turned out that it wasn't gremlins, but a Microsoft Outlook issue that has been resolved, Ms. Swain-Giboney said. gremlin or not, the experience has left the employees at RedWolf a little weary.

"Don't laugh if you visit our offices and see the monitors draped in garlic and hex signs drawn all over the sides of the hard drives. We're not paranoid. There really are tiny monsters in our computer," she said.

Tammy vs. Tammy

Storm winds wrecked plans for Tammy Stout, the director of the Augusta Sports Council, this month. It was all Tammy's fault.

When Ms. Stout heard a tropical storm had been named Tammy, she knew it wasn't a good sign.

Sure enough, the storm grounded North Carolina Tar Heels basketball coach Roy Williams so he couldn't fly to Augusta.

"We had 200 people excited to meet him," said Ms. Stout, who had been planning the event for months.

Ms. Stout rebounded and found another speaker by pulling a coach from the audience. The storm's name could have just been a coincidence or, maybe it revealed its target.

Blood red

A car runs a stoplight, slamming into another carrying Walter Sprouse and his co-worker at a North Carolina radio station.

The impact of the crash threw red chunks everywhere, splattering the windshield. The scene looked like a massacre.

"Everyone thought we were dead until we somehow got out of the car," said Mr. Sprouse, now the executive director for the Development Authority of Richmond County.

Luckily, it wasn't blood. Nobody was hurt.

For a promotion at the station, the manager had come up with an ad campaign in which cherry pies would be given to potential advertisers. The pies contained a flag stuck in them that read "We don't want all your advertising pie, just a slice of it."

While delivering a carload of pies, their car was hit. Both men were covered in cherry pie filling and crust.

Driving targets

Certain jobs have their risks, but getting shot at wasn't one that Joe and Frank had counted on.

The two meter readers for Georgia Power Co. arrived at Telfair Street to turn off a customer's electricity. While they did that, the woman hollered for her brother to come over.

Joe and Frank explained to the brother and his friend that the bill had not been paid.

The men paid the bill, and the power was turned back on. The men became upset, however, when Joe, 53, and Frank, 49, informed them they could not give change for a payment.

"We don't give change in the field. We just credit it to the account," Frank said.

The men threatened Joe and Frank, who proceeded to leave. As they left, windows in the van shattered. Three bullets struck the vehicle, one piercing the dashboard, but all missing the two meter readers.

"You have a lot of hazards, but that's not one you'd expect to happen to you," Frank said.

The men involved in the shooting pleaded guilty, so Joe and Frank, whose names are withheld for their safety, never had to testify.

Reach Tony Lombardo at (706) 823-3227 or tony.lombardo@augustachronicle.com.