How does a sneaky recessive gene, a fishbowl like living situation, and a habit of marrying your cousins lead to a group of people sporting skin the color of fish hooks? Today we talk about the Blue Fugates, a family of mountaineers who sparked more than just conversation when they went in for a check up.
How does a sneaky recessive gene, a fishbowl like living situation, and a habit of marrying your cousins lead to a group of people sporting skin the color of fish hooks? Today we talk about the Blue Fugates, a family of mountaineers who sparked more than just conversation when they went in for a check up.
Hello, and welcome to the Odder podcast. I'm your host Madison Page. And today I'm taking you for a drive in my neck of the woods, as we learn about the fabled, but real blue Fugate's of troublesome Creek, a family afflicted with a malady, so rare and shocking, and whose descendants may still carry it on today. Today on the Otter side, grab your trail mix and your compass. We are headed deep into the Appalachian mountains. So let's go Well. Well, well, welcome back, everyone. So happy to have you joining me around my supper table. As today, we look into a legend from Kentucky. I was born and raised in Kentucky. So I actually grew up hearing the story, but the details would change. Sometimes it was blue people, but sometimes it was pig faced people. While I didn't grow up in the mountains, I often heard stories from people who had about the narrow roads made of dirt and sparse gravel, crudely built homes and trailers that clung tightly between the road and the mountainsides. I'd hear of bigfoot and haints and all special kinds of things I will touch on later. Now I kind of cut it close with this one. I didn't actually get it finished till the day right before it was due to be published. I had a whole other idea planned that I had been working on, but it just didn't have the luster it needed. And so I jumped ship last minute and put this together instead, I have a lot of pride in this podcast. I maybe recording in a spare room of my house on a struggling little Chromebook, but I still want to give you guys the best content I can, but enough of that let's get into the story. So what do you think of when you picture Kentucky. Fried chicken seems a strong front runner, horses, maybe due to the Derby or Mammoth cave, but what about the blue people of the mountains? I'll give it to you that this is maybe less known and popular, but at its height, the tales of this family spread throughout newspapers all over the country. It all starts back in 1820. When a French immigrant named Martin Fugate moved to troublesome Creek in Eastern Kentucky. Troublesome Creek is a body of water that flows through Breathitt, Perry and Knott counties. At the time, and for several years following, this was a very isolated place. There were no roads here. So you did your business with your neighbors and your family, but once you settled, that was where you would stay. Martin met and married a pretty redheaded local girl named Elizabeth Smith, the pair settled down and had seven children. However, it became quickly apparent that there was something very different about this family, Of those seven children, four were blue. Now the exact shade has been in some dispute. It seems it was not a standard color, but more of a variety. People who knew the Fugate's and later the Combs who would also begin birthing bright bouncing babies the color of blueberries would describe the color as that of an Oxford cloth blue shirt, gun metal, blue as fish hooks, or blue as indigo. Those are all direct quotes. Of Martin and Elizabeth's seven children, four were born blue. Family lore also states that Martin himself was blue, but no official histories of the area mention it. Elizabeth was apparently very pale Whether or not, Martin was Papa smurfing it up in them there hills, Elizabeth's genes were essential to the blue skin of their babies. Now here's where the family tree gets a little close rooted. As I mentioned before, troublesome Creek was a very isolated place. Nobody really moved in and nobody really moved out. So while Fugates married Combs', Richie's and Stacy's, they also married back into the Smiths and other Fugates. Now I think the deliverance jokes have been done to death, and frankly, I'm not interested in continuing the trend. So let's all take a big breath and just say the elephant in the room, The family was inbreeding and that is one of the factors that continued spreading of the blue skin gene, Dennis Stacy, a descendant of the family and genealogist who traced back his family roots discovered this when he found that his mother and father's great-grandfather was Henley Fugate, making his parents second cousins. Mary and Elizabeth's blue kids went on to have blue kids of their own. Zacharia, one of their sons married his aunt. This specific bloodline would eventually work its way down to the last known blue Fugate born, Benjamin Stacy, affectionately called Benji, who nearly gave his doctors and nurses heart attacks when in 1975, he was born with blue skin. After rushing the infant to a hospital where a test found no problems with the baby and preparing a blood transfusion doctors were stopped when the baby's grandmother brought up the link to the blue Fugates and stated that Benji's great-grandmother Luna Fugate was the bluest woman she ever saw. Benji would eventually lose the blue tent in his skin, but reported that his lips and fingernails would still turn blue when he was angry or cold. So how does some unorthodox relations lead to a swarm of blue skin mountaineers? It actually goes all the way back to the combination of Elizabeth and Martin and a sneaky little recessive gene they both carried. If you were born or living or dying in 1974 and opened up the November 7th edition of the Arizona Republic, you would find an article all about the blue people of Kentucky. In it you would see claims by Zach"big man" Fugate, who states that he was told the blue color was because the family was Swedish and another from Lee Fugate, who was told by his grandfather that the family descended from a race of blue people in Europe. The neighbors of the family believed the blue color was caused by heart disease, lung disorders, possibly a hex placed on the family or that their blood was just a little closer to their skin. Whatever was causing the shades of blue in the family seemed to be doing little else but that. The blue Fugates reported excellent health and most lived well into their 80s or 90s. So what condition passed along family lines could color generations like a blue period but otherwise leave them in great health. This is what Dr. Madison Cawein III wanted to find out. Dr. Cawein III was a hematologist at the University of Kentucky medical clinic. He was a very accomplished practitioner having helped isolate an antidote for cholera and did some early work on L-dope, the drug for Parkinson's disease. However, blood was his real love and he was quoted as having remarked"Blood cells always looked so beautiful to me". Before I get much further into this guy. Let's just say, he's quite the character. He was the grandson of Kentucky's poet Laureate, Madison Cawein in 1964, his wife was murdered by chemical poisoning, but no one was ever indicted. He's just kind of this odd little guy, but he is critical to the story. And you'll see more of what I'm talking about as we continue Cawein heard rumors about the blue people while working at his Lexington clinic. Thoroughly intrigued, he set up stomping around the Hills, looking for them. He found Ruth Pendergrass, a nurse at the American heart association clinic in Hazard, Kentucky who offered to help him. She told him her own encounter of meeting a young woman on a cold afternoon, who was seeking a blood test. She described her face and fingernails as almost indigo blue. She was convinced the woman was moments from death before being assured by her, that her family was blue and that this was completely normal. The nurse and doctor went on sort of a bigfoot hunt, trudging up and down hollows fighting off mean farm dogs. They would describe spotting someone on top of the hill, who they thought looked blue and rushing to pursue that person only for them to vanish by the time they reached the top of the hill. Now, listen, if I'm chilling on top of my hill and two strangers start yelling and running at me, I would also not stick around to see what they want it wasn't until they managed to successfully corner Patrick and Rachel Richie in the hazard clinic, they were related to the Fugates and both sported a blue tent to their skin, Brace yourself according to Cawein, they were bluer'n'hell. And I'm so mad I can say that so well, this, this guy, I mean, Jesus. Cawein and Pendergrass both talked the couple into giving statements and blood samples. The Richie's were embarrassed by the interrogation, but answered what they could upon seeing the pair. Cawein finally had an idea of what was causing the blue color. He believed it to be a condition called Methemoglobinemia. I might not be saying that correctly. I really did try. So here we go. Again, Methemoglobinemia is a blood disorder in which an abnormal amount of Methemoglobin, a form of hemoglobin is produced. According to the national Institute for health, hemoglobin is responsible for distributing oxygen to the body and without oxygen, the heart brain and muscles can die. In Methemoglobinemia, the hemoglobin is unable to carry oxygen and it also makes its difficult for unaffected hemoglobin to release oxygen efficiently to body tissues. Patient lips are purple. The skin looks blue and the blood is the color of chocolate because it is not oxygenated. This disease is extremely rare. Normally people have about 1% of methemoglobin, which causes no effect to the body, but patients with levels greater than 20% can experience heart abnormalities, seizures, or death. However, there is a sweet spot between 10% and 20% where a person may develop blue skin, but have no other symptoms. This is the level the blue Fugates hovered in. This is why they appeared so strangely healthy and lived such long lives, even though there was something clearly different about them. So how did this disease spread through the Fugates line? Well, if you remember earlier, we talked about the possibility that Martin Fugate was blue when he married his wife, Elizabeth, but that she was described as being very pale, almost as pale as mountain Laurel. Well, the stroke of luck on this is astronomical. You see recessive genes are very picky. Even if you have a nasty recessive gene that causes abnormalities and you marry someone who doesn't have this gene, the likelihood of it passing on to any progeny is very slim. So for the blue Fugates children to be born blue and to then spread their gene to their children, Elizabeth must have had the same Methemoglobinemia causing gene as her husband deep within her DNA. Once their children were born and began to go forth and prosper with their cousins and other relations, the gene continued to propagate and appear in the newborns leading to more and more blue people. Those that were born blue and then faded to only showing blue in the lips and fingernails likely only had one gene for the disorder, but they could still pass this gene on. This cycle of blue babies marrying their blue cousins and having more blue babies would continue for years in this little fish bowl of isolation that clan lived in. The railroads did not come through Eastern Kentucky until the coal mines pulled in there in 1912. And it took a further 30 to 40 years for accompanying roads to slither up the mountainsides. Dr. Cawein's theory was reported by a 1960 report in the journal of clinical investigation by E. M. Scott. Scott was a public health service doctor at the Arctic health research center in Anchorage here. He discovered hereditary Methemoglobinemia, I am so sorry if I cannot say that, among Alaska Eskimos and Indians, just like the Fugates. This was caused by a recessive gene that caused an absence of the enzyme Diaphorase in their red blood cells. The gene was passed from parent to child and would, he concluded, appear most often in an inbred line. Dr. Cawein got his confirmation when he tested the blood taken from Rachel and Patrick, their blood had a similar enzyme deficiency to the Alaskans and the Scott observations. Their blood had accumulated so much of the blue molecules that they overrode the red hemoglobin that normally turned skin pink in most Caucasians. The bluest Fugate was Luna Stacy who lived a long life, had 13 children and died at 84. The love story between her and her husband is, is actually kind of sweet. They met at a Sunday service at old regular Baptist church before the turn of the century, he was struck by her and proceeded to court her before proposing, they moved to troublesome creed to make a living in timber on her father, Levi Fugate's, land. Even after her passing, John wouldn't hear of leaving the two room cabin he built with his own hands for Luna all those years ago. So was the doctor able to produce a solution for the blue skin? Well, yes and no. The doctor prescribed methylene blue. This substance would become an electron donor for the blood and reverse some of the effects of, oh, here we go again, Methemoglobinemia. However, this was only a temporary solution and also caused them to pee blue. A fact which one of the mountaineer's pointed out stating that he could see the old blue running out of his skin. The doctor provided each f amily with enough to take a s a daily pill and reported the f amily delighted when their blue shades started to pinken. Today, there are no more blue Fugates but this is not the result of the m ethylene blue. Rather the arrival of railroads and roadways allowed the Fugates to leave and spread out. They married outside of the family line to people who didn't carry the same gene as them. Over time, this bled the blue from the family line with the occasional exception like Benji Stacy. Nobody knows where Benji Stacy is today. And his family refuses to talk to the media, which is understandable. The rumors of intermarriages were very stressful for them. I just think this is such a cool story of how all those urban legends you hear could actually be true. Did I believe in the pig people of the mountains when I heard that story over a 4H campfire, absolutely not. Did a family with a strange genetic trait that affect their physical appearance exist in the mountains. Yes they did. Sometimes there is more truth to stories than we want to admit. Well, that's all for this episode. Sorry. If it was a bit crunchy, I was getting it finished right on the wire. I hope you enjoyed it. And I'd love to hear what you think. How about that doctor? Huh? He's a weird little guy. I actually might cover his wife's murder later. Maybe we can solve it together. Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, how you like this episode and leave us a review. The Odder podcast post every other Thursday. If you have a suggestion for a subject on the podcast, you can email us@ theodderpod@gmail.com. All music featured in this episode comes from in copy tech.com. Thanks for listening. And I'll see you next time on the O side.