This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

Not long ago, I found myself in a subterranean labyrinth

below the streets of Washington, DC.

I'd come and 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 1979 008.

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 you, really.

The author of this collection is Richard Riley Shepard,

a small-time crook and con man who died in 2009.

I've been tracking Riley Shepard for a few months.

My assumption is that there's nothing of significance in the box.

...