A photographer who documented America's "most inbred family" has said it was the "craziest thing I'd ever seen".
Deeming them "out of control" during his time photographing them, Mark Laita, 63, has looked back on the time he spent with the family.
Communicating in a series of grunts and barks, the secret lives of the most inbred family in America was showcased during a trip to the rural mountain town of Odd, West Virginia.
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Odd indeed, as the 63-year-old photographer soon found in the town with a population of 779 people – including the Whittaker family – the oddball inbreds that shot to fame after Mark's photographs were published.
Describing the scene as similar to that of the 1972 feature film Deliverance, Mark was astonished at the strange moments that would happen "over and over".
He said: "There’s these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us.
"The one guy you’d look at him in the eye or say anything and he’d scream and go running away and his pants would fall around his ankles and he’d go running off and go kick the garbage can. This would happen over and over."
Later visits to the Whittaker family and Odd village showed the family still surviving, with mental and physical woes affecting some whose parents were double first cousins, meaning that they share both sets of grandparents, New York Post reported.
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According to a relative who could speak, they told Laita they could "understand what you talking about" and would make it clear they "don't like it" by "yelling".
Mark's frequent visits to the family have seen the photographer snap plenty of shots, but also highlight the poverty they live in.
He has since set up a GoFundMe to aid the family, raising £40,000 ($50,000) for the Whittaker clan, which will go toward "living expenses and home improvements".
The 63-year-old photographer added: "Despite the fact that they don’t complain, it’s a really rough life."
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