"In decades of covering campaigns, I’ve seen plenty of historical relics... But none of that prepared me for the morning last fall..."

"... when my dog was running around with her pack of neighborhood playmates, and my friend Ledge turned to me and asked a question so bizarre that for a moment I was sure I’d misheard him. 'Hey,' he said, 'did I tell you I have John Marshall’s gallstones?'... You can still visit Marshall’s house in Richmond, where any mention of a troubled urinary tract is conspicuously missing. I suppose someone who lived in a normal city, maybe Akron or Omaha, would have nervously laughed off Ledge’s question and started talking to someone else. But in Washington, where we practice what Abraham Lincoln called our 'political religion,' we cling to creepy totems, proof that the Founding Fathers and their celebrated successors once walked among the living...."

So begins "My neighbor found Lincoln’s hair in his basement. I found a mystery" by Matt Bai (WaPo).

You'll have to read the story, but it ends: "All that remained of the world of Aunt Judy and her parents was an unbearably sad legacy, and it had come to rest in his basement, where the easiest thing to do was to look away. We’re all collectors of something, whether we choose to be or not."