This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Not long ago, I found myself in a subterranean labyrinth below the streets of Washington DC.
I'd come in search of clues.
So here we are in deck 50 in the stacks of the Library of Congress.
I'm opening a door that's marked door 20.
My guide is a tall, shaggy man named Steve Winick.
He looks a lot like Hagrid from Harry Potter, which seems about right for somebody with a title of folklorist.
Steve has already led me through a maze of low ceiling stacks, across a small bridge and into a tiny elevator where the floor numbers go up as we go down.
But now we've arrived in here.
We find row upon row of collection boxes on the shelves and I'm looking for this collection which is numbered AFC 19790 zero eight.
Steve pulls from the shelf a cardboard box.
Nobody's really used this collection very much so it's simply, you know, been there waiting for.
For you, really.
The author of this collection is Richard Riley Shepherd, a small time crook and con man who died in 2009.
I've been tracking Riley shepherd for a few months.
My assumption is that there's nothing of significance in the box.
But I'm about to discover that the story I thought I was reporting is not the story I am reporting.
The story that is about to unfold before me is a story of obsession, its power, its beauty and its costs.
This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the peculiar tale of Riley Shepherd, a musician and writer who spent decades on a single grand project.