They were part of collections of stories-I don’t remember if they were the same author in each or not. One was about a guy who found a huge hoard of silver in his field. Another was a guy who gradually learned to see through things until one day he saw a blockage in his own body moving toward his heart.
I only remember one story from the other collection: a man takes a room on a ship, but he’s warned that it’s haunted. every night he hears the porthole open, and there’s something wet in the bunk above him, but he can’t open the curtain to see.
Roald Dahl.
The first is non-fiction, or at least closely based on a real story, The Mildenhall Treasure
The second is from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
It’s only a brief part. The title character learns to see through playing cards, and can thus make a fortune gambling. In the middle of the story, the author speculates about possible endings to the story, where the character might see a blood clot moving to his heart. However, the real ending to the story is where the character decides to give all the money to charity.
Both in this collection
I saw the Mildenhall treasure the last time I visited London. It’s in some museum north of Russell Square, very famous, can’t remember the name just now. I want to say the British Library but that doesn’t sound quite right.
ETA: British Museum. And it’s just south of Russell Square.
(It’s been a while.)
I think your other story may be Second Night Out by Frank Belknap Long. It’s in a collection I have at home called Davy Jones’ Haunted Locker. One of my prize possessions!
Those Dahl stories were kind of creepy from what I recall, but the descriptions don’t bear that out.
I don’t remember any of the other stories in the book. I want to say one was about a hunter?
I can’t recall one fitting that description. This is the table of contents:
Great Ghost Stories of the Sea, selected by Robert Arthur, Illustrated by Joseph Cellini, Random House 1965, 204 pages. Includes: Jabez O’Brien and Davy Jones’ Locker
One August in the Red Sea
The Three Fishers
Fire in the Galley Stove
Ship-in-a-Bottle
The Flying Dutchman
Second Night Out
The Hemp
The Stone Ship
Forty Singing Seamen
The Voice in the Night
The City in the Sea
The Phantom Ship
The Yarn of the Nancy Bell
The Roll Call of the Reef
On Board the Derelict Anty Bligh
Full Fathom Five
I thought A Voice in the Night was one of the creepiest, about sailors hearing a voice in the fog, from a shipwrecked man who asked only for food, but not rescue. He tells them the story of how he and his fiance were stranded on an island and felt compelled to eat of the strange grey moss that grew there.
The Stone Ship, about a petrified wreck brought temporarily to the surface of the waves; and Ship-in-a-Bottle, about a man who finds a strange little shop he once visited in childhood, were other favorites.
Now, there is another Robert Arthur book I recommend every chance I get: Ghosts and More Ghosts. In one of the stories, a man is telling a newspaper vendor about the hunter who has been chasing him, when the hunter shows up. What happens next has to be mostly imagined, as the newspaper vendor is blind. 