Gerrard Kaonga
Filmmaker Mark Laita has issued a warning to people who want to see America’s ‘most inbred family’ for themselves.
YouTuber Mark Laita has been documenting the life of quite a bizarre family in America for a few years.
The West Virginia Whittaker family, that lives in the aptly named hamlet Odd, have let the social media creator into their less than conventional lives.
But while Laita can now highlight that the family live in an isolated backcountry shack with no formal education, it proved difficult to get them to agree to in the first place.
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Laita was initially threatened by their protective neighbors but remained determined and eventually got escorted by police to meet the Whittakers.
The neighbors were initially concerned that the family would be taken advantage of and exploited as they are aware that members of the family were only able to speak in grunts or squeals and appeared to be physically and mentally unwell.
Speaking about his first interactions while on the Koncrete KLIP podcast, Laita said: “It was like that little scene from Deliverance that everyone knows. We came around to this road, which turns into a country road, which turns into a dirt road.
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"Then we come to this trailer and then a little shack on the other side of the road. And there’s these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us.
"And then one guy, you would look him in the eye or say anything and he would just scream and go running away, and his pants would fall around his ankles, and he would go running off and go and kick a garbage can. And this would happen over and over. It was out of control - the craziest thing I have ever seen."
In his YouTube videos, Laita has also warned other people about simply finding the family and trying to do something similar to making a documentary. He insisted they are unlikely to get a friendly and warm welcome.
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He has said: "They are kind of protected by the neighbours and the relatives [who] don’t like these people coming to ridicule them."
The YouTuber has also admitted it can be difficult for him to know just how 'inbred' the family is.
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During the documentary, the filmmaker spoke to siblings, Betty, Lorraine and Ray, and cousin, Timmy.
He said: "There is no way I would be able to confirm that the Whittaker parents were related, but given that this does happen in this part of the country and the Whittakers are the most extreme case I’ve seen so far. I would bet that inbreeding was at least partly responsible for the mental and physical abnormalities seen in [siblings] Lorraine, Freddie, Ray, and [cousin] Timmy.”