People are urged not to visit America’s ‘most inbred family’ in West Virginia. Documentary filmmaker and social media star Mark Laita said people should stay away from the Whittakers’ home in Odd, West Virginia.
Laita, who runs a YouTube channel that documents the unique lives of the Whittakers, said the family should be left alone to live their off-the-grid lifestyle. According to Laita, the family lives in an isolated shack, devoid of modernity or formal education.
Concerned neighbors initially feared the family might be taken advantage of due to their simple way of communicatingusually just through soundsand visible physical and cognitive challenges, reports Yorkshire Live.
Speaking on the Koncrete KLIP podcast, Laita described his initial approach: “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.”
“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.”
Despite opposition and concerns of exploitation by the worried neighbors, Laita pressed on, and with a police escort, finally made contact with the Whittakers.
“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.”
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Laita also cautioned others against trying to locate the family for similar documentary projects, citing that they’re unlikely to be met with a warm welcome, as he said: “They are kind of protected by the neighbors and the relatives [who] don’t like these people coming to ridicule them.”
He’s admitted the difficulty in determining the extent of the family’s “inbreeding”. While filming the documentary with Whittaker family members Betty, Lorraine, Ray, and cousin Timmy, he stated: “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.”
