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grackle
25-09-2007, 12:55 AM
THE DEEP CAVERNS OF CUSHMAN ARKANSAS
Excerpt from branton's THE UNDERGROUND EMPIRE
Sent in by Ted Loman

During the latter part of the 1950's the exploration party had investigated some very interesting caverns, mainly within the area of Arkansas and the surrounding states. At on point they came across one particular cavern some miles north of Batesville, Arkansas. This was in an area where several caverns were located. Many of these caves (concentrated generally NW-West of the town of Cushman) have in fact been the subject of some very interesting accounts, suggesting that there might be more thanone route to the nether regions below other than the one discovered by David L. and his friends. There are accounts of several people who have entered some of these caves and were never seen again; or who encountered strange phenomena deep underground - such as electrical failure of flashlights, suggesting possible electromagnetic interference; accounts involving extremely deep caverns; gas pockets encountered at extreme depths; and an account concerning one of the caves west of Cushman which seemed to have ancient carvings over it depicting various figures; and there is even one account which came from an Oklahoma man who was told by a friend of his of being chased from a cavern west of Cushman by a large hairy humanoid who began throwing boulders at him as if annoyingly scaring him out of "his" territory!

At one point David L's group came across one particular cavern near the town. Over a period of years, returning from time to time to this particular cavern, the explorers had crossed underground lakes, followed dead-end leads, explored "breakdown" areas, investigated numerous cracks and chasms, and steep inclines. One of their most fortunate discoveries was made in a large boulder-strewn break-down area about half-way between the entrance and an underground "lake". They noticed a crack in the path which they had found through the boulders and, following this crack into the thick of the breakdown they came across another area where the crevice widened enough to allow them entrance. Following this they descended for a very great distance for a very long while, down a sloping 45 degree incline, so steep in places that rope had to be used. This steep, sloping passage led them past a couple of horizontal "side passages" which they followed a few miles to dead ends, and continued deeper through at least one more crevice. Eventually they emerged into a large cavernous area hundreds of feet high and long, which they named "glass cave" because of it's features, and used it as a central "camp" in subsequent explorations. The remarkable thing about this cavern, however, was their claim that it was located almost 4 MILES beneath the surface of the earth, which would definitely make it deeper than any other "officially" recognized cavern.

Time and again they explored the mazes and labyrinths deep in the earth using "glass cave" as their central camp. Two passages in the far wall of this chamber, opposite from the crevice through which they first entered glass cave, were each explored for 3 days continuously before they decided to turn back. According to David L., these passages still continued onward with no end in sight. Could these have led to the gloomy 'hadean' like caverns which they were to see later, and which they alleged contained 'gigantic serpents' or snakes capable of crushing a human being to death in a few seconds?

After some experiments involving air flow within glass cave, the explorers were able to trace slight air movements to another as-yet- undiscovered crevice hidden within the wall, not far from the crevice which they had entered from above. This passage, through relatively small, continued still DEEPER into the earth. They explored the steep incline for what they approximated to be a mile, before reaching an area of "breakdown". This "seemed" to be the end of the line. Just as they were about to turn back in disappointment from this passage which had taken them deeper than they had ever been before, one of the members of the team noticed that the light of their carbide lamps seemed to have a faint amber tint to it. All of them were perplexed, wondering what would be causing the phenomena.

It was decided that they would all turn off their lamps in order to see if the greenish luminescence remained. They did so, and a minute or so afterwards their eyes adjusted to the darkness and they could faintly distinguish a greenish luminescence which seemed to emanate from the lowest part of the passage in an area where heavy "breakdown" SEEMED to close off any further progress.

George Wight was the first one to make his way to the spot in the breakdown area from which the faint light seemed to emanate and, after removing more rocks, they discovered that still another crack or crevice, barely wide enough for one man to enter at a time, descended vertically from beneath the breakdown.
According to David L., Wight volunteered himself to be the first to explore the crevice, and soon afterwards he was on his way down. A few minutes passed before those above heard the sound of what they could only guess was George slipping and falling down the crevice.

After a period of uncertainty those above, concerned for his safety, were relieved to hear the faint voice of George Wight rising up from apparently several dozen feet below. They were able to make out his excited words to the effect that he had fallen into a large tunnel, and encouraged the others to follow him.

They did so, and when they were all in the 'tunnel' they stood in stunned silence. The passage which stretched out from them in BOTH directions was not like the common natural cavern passages which they had explored for the past few days. In fact, it seemed more artificial than natural. Approximately a dozen feet in height and about the same in width, the 'tunnel' was similar in shape to a subway tunnel, having a domed ceiling and a flat floor. What really caught their attention however, was the fact that the tunnel was illuminated by a greenish phosphorescence to the point that they did not need their carbide lamps to see their surroundings. The strange luminescence seemed to emanate from the walls of the tunnel itself, which were clear and glass-like yet at the same time extremely hard.

In one direction the lighting effect faded out into blackness, while in the other direction the light seemed to increase. One of the members suggested that the light might be coming from the surface, and that they might be in one of the old mines which existed in the area of the cavern entrance, but others brought up the fact that, according to their calculations, they were at least five miles beneath the earth and therefore the light probably did not come from the surface.

Subsequently, the explorers decided to investigate in the direction of the "light" since it would allow them to keep some carbide in reserve for their return trip. At one point the tunnel (which was apparently cut through solid rock much of the way and then glazed over with the hard, transparent substance) opened into a gigantic cavern. Actually, this occurred several times and at intervals, as if those who constructed the tunnel intentionally meant for them to intersect the various cavern systems. Did the ancient builders of this tunnel system possess a combination of gravitometers, x-rays and sounding radars to detect these cavities? Even as it passed through these large caverns, the tunnel still continued in the form of a transparent domed enclosure, still the same shape as before, yet this time the hard transparent substance was in the form of a 'wall' a foot or so thick that protected the group from the 'outside' or cavern environment. And fortunately so, for beyond the luminescent walls, were black expanses of gloomy darkness within which they could faintly make out huge moving and slithering figures of what seemed to be giant serpents and other grotesque reptilian creatures as well as other non-reptilian creatures, including giant insects.

If not for the fact that these creatures were physical, tangible things, these dark caverns could have been likely candidates for the legendary 'Hades' of Greek and Hebrew tradition.

The most shocking surprise of all, however, occurred on the third day after exploration of this tunnel began, a considerable distance from the crevice from which they entered the tunnel. They were walking along when all-of-the-sudden they turned around and found themselves face-to-face with a group of human-like beings who stood around 7 to 8 feet tall. 'Their' skin had a faint pale-bluish, almost clay-bluish tint to it and their eyes were relatively large and owl- like. But 'they' were definitely human, according to David L., who was on this particular expedition. The 'people' took out some type of electronic device, apparently some kind of parabolic communicator, and after a few attempts they succeeded in establishing a communication link using the electronic 'translator'.

At this point their story becomes even more complex, and the exact series of events, in their chronological order, are rather undefined. First, the strange 'people' made it known that the tunnel led to a network that went all throughout the earth and to even greater depths. 'They' had certain types of instruments that could monitor from a distance the emotional field or make-up of a person and thus determine their intentions. It was only because 'the group' was found to possess an emotional makeup indicating relatively non-violent and non-selfish motivations that they were chosen to be contacted. 'They' made it known that the cavers could have traveled through the underground tunnels for weeks and would not have discovered their "city" if "they" did not wish them to, as the entrance to it was so well hidden. Here then, are some of the other incidents which allegedly occurred after the group encountered the strange people, or rather after these people CONTACTED the group (chronological sequence uncertain):

1) The group learned that the tunnels continued for hundreds of miles, at least. After the initial contact, the topsiders were taken to a hidden "elevator" and were then taken through this to the "city" where these people resided. This community was apparently made out of a glass-like substance, somewhat like the makeup of the tunnels themselves.

2) Their lifestyle, way of life, society, government, etc., was described as being radically different than that which existed on the surface. These people possessed a "Book of Laws" or a moral code by which they attempted to live. According to David L., if any of their society became violent or became a threat to the rest they were expelled into the tunnels, given sufficient provisions to make it on their own, and generally forced to seek out their destiny in other parts of the nether regions. This punishment for unrepentant "criminals" was apparently practiced only on very rare occasions.

3) The technology used by this civilization was very complex, and is based largely on the technology of the lost races who lived before the flood and whose demise resulted in the abandonment of the subterranean system, along with all of the sophisticated technology which had been left there as well. The race encountered by David L. and his group allegedly were direct descendants of Noah, and were of a race of explorers who came to the Western Hemisphere some centuries following the deluge and discovered and took up residence within the ancient subsystem where they now resided. Some of the technology left by the "ancients" is still not understood by the people encountered by the speleologists. The group was also shown tremendous dark caverns miles beneath the city, where the subterraneans had found ancient ruins of this ancient lost race. Some of these buildings were sealed, apparently the desperate act of the vanished race who built them.

4) Some of the caverns--especially the extremely deep one's in which the ancient cities were found--were miles in diameter. Some were pitch black and so still and silent that a whisper could seemingly be heard miles away. Some of the upper caverns through which the 'tunnel' penetrated contained not only serpent-like creatures but also huge, hairy 'humanoids', perhaps tied-in with the Sasquatch family. These however were particularly violent in nature, possibly due to their environment and constant proximity to the serpents. Apparently there was an ongoing conflict between the "hairy" humanoids and the reptilian creatures in the caverns. According to David L., these hairy giants had faces "only a mother could love". On one occasion, their subterranean friends demonstrated some type of hand-held beam weapon by pointing it at one of the large serpents which could be seen through the tunnel "walls". The beam melted through the transparent barrier and the serpent disappeared in a sizzling glow of fire.

5) The group attempted to tell their story to friends of theirs on the surface. Apparently they made several trips after their first encounter with the blue-skinned race. However, their story was rejected and met with mockery and ridicule. They attempted to gather proof of their visit, and made a special trip "down under" just for that purpose, and succeeded in capturing a "giant cave moth" which roamed the deeper caverns. They placed it in a bag and upon returning topside they opened the bag and exposed the creature to the brilliant summer sun. For some reason, the sunlight had a disintegrating effect on the insect and before they could show it to anyone as proof it had dried up, become brittle and eventually crumbled to dust. After this, they gave up all attempts to get anyone to believe them, and resigned themselves to keep the secret among the twelve individuals who made up the exploration and support teams, that is, until David L. was given permission to reveal the story to the now late Charles A. Marcoux (Note: Marcoux incidentally died as a result of a 'heart attack', while exploring the surface areas around the Cushman caves. His wife described it as a sudden and irrational attack of fear resulting from a swarm of bees that Charles had encountered. One must realize that 'fear' is one of the most powerful weapons utilized by the 'infernals' who would attempt to blind mankind to conditions taking place in the inner world. However, by the grace of God Almighty, many have been able to defend themselves from the "body terror" utilized by the reptilians and which can often lead to paralysis, heart attacks, insanity or even suicide).

Eventually George Wight decided to remain below with their subterranean friends, and on their second-to-the-last trip they said their goodbyes. They allegedly made one more trip afterwards during which they met with their friend, who was doing well, for the last time. The peculiar thing about this incident, according to David, was that shortly after Wight had joined this underground society all evidence and records of him ever existing began to mysteriously disappear from the surface. Birth certificates, school records, computer records, bank records, etc. all seemed to vanish, apparently the work of someone in a very influential position who was able to erase all evidence that Wight had ever lived. Some researchers still retain copies of George Wight's articles from the old UFO periodical, nevertheless. This would open up the possibility that this underground race closely monitors events on the surface, and even has "workers" in various influential positions who act as mediators in surface society. Everything points to the fact that this subterranean race prefers it's privacy and does not wish to become involved in the political conflict and chaos which has for untold centuries plagued the surface world by warring factions constantly fighting over territorial rights, etc.
There is apparently much more to this account than we can relate here, however for various reasons, specific information other than that which we have just related will have to remain confidential. One can seemingly find "connections" between this account and others which have been related by other sources. For instance, John Lear has stated to some researchers that certain Apollo astronauts encountered another terran or earth-based race on the moon, a race that apparently made it there long before America did, and this 7 ft. tall, large-eyed race of humans seems to fit the same description as that given by David L. The people that Lear referred to allegedly have an alliance with the 'Blondes'. Is it possible that the underground people contacted by David know of and interact with the Telosians?

Whether this small item has any connection with the people allegedly encountered by the speleologists is uncertain, but it was related by John Keel in his book 'THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES': "...The Cherokees have a tradition, according to Benjamin Smith Barton's 'NEW VIEWS OF THE ORIGINS OF THE TRIBES AND NATIONS OF AMERICA' (1798), that when they migrated to Tennessee they found the region inhabited by a weird race of white people who lived in houses and were apparently quite civilized. They had one problem: their eyes were very large and sensitive to light. They could only see at night..." Is it possible that these people may have later taken up a cave- dwelling lifestyle, if they had not done so previously, to allow themselves more comfortable living conditions?
http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=blue-skinned+people+Cushman%2C+Arkansas&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501&u=ufoexperiences.blogspot.com/2006/02/deep-caverns-of-cushman-arkansas.html&w=blue+skinned+people+cushman+arkansas&d=e8DZH_4-PcaE&icp=1&.intl=us

grackle
25-09-2007, 04:33 AM
http://www.doh.state.fl.us/pharmacy/Images/silver2.jpg
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:kBm-Srr8W6oJ:www.rootsweb.com/~kyperry3/Blue_Fugates_Troublesome_Creek.html+blue+people&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
THE BLUE PEOPLE OF TROUBLESOME CREEK
The story of an Appalachian malady, an inquisitive doctor, and a paradoxical cure.
by Cathy Trost
©Science 82, November, 1982
Six generations after a French orphan named Martin Fugate settled on the banks of eastern Kentucky's Troublesome Creek with his redheaded American bride, his great-great-great great grandson was born in a modern hospital not far from where the creek still runs.

The boy inherited his father's lankiness and his mother's slightly nasal way of speaking.

What he got from Martin Fugate was dark blue skin. "It was almost purple," his father recalls.

Doctors were so astonished by the color of Benjamin "Benjy" Stacy's skin that they raced him by ambulance from the maternity ward in the hospital near Hazard to a medical clinic in Lexington. Two days of tests produced no explanation for skin the color of a bruised plum.

A transfusion was being prepared when Benjamin's grandmother spoke up. "Have you ever heard of the blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek?" she asked the doctors.

"My grandmother Luna on my dad's side was a blue Fugate. It was real bad in her," Alva Stacy, the boy's father, explained. "The doctors finally came to the conclusion that Benjamin's color was due to blood inherited from generations back."

Benjamin lost his blue tint within a few weeks, and now he is about as normal looking a seven-year-old boy as you could hope to find. His lips and fingernails still turn a shade of purple-blue when he gets cold or angry a quirk that so intrigued medical students after Benjamin's birth that they would crowd around the baby and try to make him cry. "Benjamin was a pretty big item in the hospital," his mother says with a grin.

Dark blue lips and fingernails are the only traces of Martin Fugate's legacy left in the boy; that, and the recessive gene that has shaded many of the Fugates and their kin blue for the past 162 years.

They're known simply as the "blue people" in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the pain of being blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black.

There was always speculation in the hollows about what made the blue people blue: heart disease, a lung disorder, the possibility proposed by one old-timer that "their blood is just a little closer to their skin." But no one knew for sure, and doctors rarely paid visits to the remote creekside settlements where most of the "blue Fugates " lived until well into the 1950s. By the time a young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in the 1960s to cure the blue people, Martin Fugate's descendants had multiplied their recessive genes all over the Cumberland Plateau.

Madison Cawein began hearing rumors about the blue people when he went to work at the University of Kentucky's Lexington medical clinic in 1960. "I'm a hematologist, so something like that perks up my ears," Cawein says, sipping on whiskey sours and letting his mind slip back to the summer he spent "tromping around the hills looking for blue people."

Cawein is no stranger to eccentricities of the body. He helped isolate an antidote for cholera, and he did some of the early work on L-dopa, the drug for Parkinson's disease. But his first love, which he developed as an Army medical technician in World War II, was hematology. "Blood cells always looked so beautiful to me," he says.

Cawein would drive back and forth between Lexington and Hazard an eight-hour ordeal before the tollway was built and scour the hills looking for the blue people he'd heard rumors about. The American Heart Association had a clinic in Hazard, and it was there that Cawein met "a great big nurse" who offered to help.

Her name was Ruth Pendergrass, and she had been trying to stir up medical interest in the blue people ever since a dark blue woman walked into the county health department one bitterly cold afternoon and asked for a blood test.

"She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!" recalls Pendergrass, who is now 69 and retired from nursing. "Her face and her fingernails were almost indigo blue. It like to scared me to death! She looked like she was having a heart attack. I just knew that patient was going to die right there in the health department, but she wasn't a'tall alarmed. She told me that her family was the blue Combses who lived up on Ball Creek. She was a sister to one of the Fugate women." About this same time, another of the blue Combses, named Luke, had taken his sick wife up to the clinic at Lexington. One look at Luke was enough to "get those doctors down here in a hurry," says Pendergrass, who joined Cawein to look for more blue people.

Trudging up and down the hollows, fending off "the two mean dogs that everyone had in their front yard," the doctor and the nurse would spot someone at the top of a hill who looked blue and take off in wild pursuit. By the time they'd get to the top, the person would be gone. Finally, one day when the frustrated doctor was idling inside the Hazard clinic, Patrick and Rachel Ritchie walked in.

"They were bluer'n hell," Cawein says. "Well, as you can imagine, I really examined them. After concluding that there was no evidence of heart disease, I said 'Aha!' I started asking them questions: 'Do you have any relatives who are blue?' then I sat down and we began to chart the family."

Cawein remembers the pain that showed on the Ritchie brother's and sister's faces. "They were really embarrassed about being blue," he said. "Patrick was all hunched down in the hall. Rachel was leaning against the wall. They wouldn't come into the waiting room. You could tell how much it bothered them to be blue."

After ruling out heart and lung diseases, the doctor suspected methemoglobinemia, a rare hereditary blood disorder that results from excess levels of methemoglobin in the blood. Methemoglobin which is blue, is a nonfunctional form of the red hemoglobin that carries oxygen. It is the color of oxygen-depleted blood seen in the blue veins just below the skin.

If the blue people did have methemoglobinemia, the next step was to find out the cause. It can be brought on by several things: abnormal hemoglobin formation, an enzyme deficiency, and taking too much of certain drugs, including vitamin K, which is essential for blood clotting and is abundant in pork liver and vegetable oil.

Cawein drew "lots of blood" from the Ritchies and hurried back to his lab. He tested first for abnormal hemoglobin, but the results were negative.

Stumped, the doctor turned to the medical literature for a clue. He found references to methemoglobinemia dating to the turn of the century, but it wasn't until he came across E. M. Scott's 1960 report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (vol. 39, 1960) that the answer began to emerge.

Scott was a Public Health Service doctor at the Arctic Health Research Center in Anchorage who had discovered hereditary methemoglobinemia among Alaskan Eskimos and Indians. It was caused, Scott speculated, by an absence of the enzyme diaphorase from their red blood cells. In normal people hemoglobin is converted to methemoglobin at a very slow rate. If this conversion continued, all the body's hemoglobin would eventually be rendered useless. Normally diaphorase converts methemoglobin back to hemoglobin. Scott also concluded that the condition was inherited as a simple recessive trait. In other words, to get the disorder, a person would have to inherit two genes for it, one from each parent. Somebody with only one gene would not have the condition but could pass the gene to a child.

Scott's Alaskans seemed to match Cawein's blue people. If the condition were inherited as a recessive trait, it would appear most often in an inbred line.

Cawein needed fresh blood to do an enzyme assay. He had to drive eight hours back to Hazard to search out the Ritchies, who lived in a tapped-out mining town called Hardburly. They took the doctor to see their uncle, who was blue, too. While in the hills, Cawein drove over to see Zach (Big Man) Fugate, the 76-year-old patriarch of the clan on Troublesome Creek. His car gave out on the dirt road to Zach's house, and the doctor had to borrow a Jeep from a filling station.

Zach took the doctor even farther up Copperhead Hollow to see his Aunt Bessie Fugate, who was blue. Bessie had an iron pot of clothes boiling in her front yard, but she graciously allowed the doctor to draw some of her blood.

"So I brought back the new blood and set up my enzyme assay," Cawein continued. "And by God, they didn't have the enzyme diaphorase. I looked at other enzymes and nothing was wrong with them. So I knew we had the defect defined.''

Just like the Alaskans, their blood had accumulated so much of the blue molecule that it over- whelmed the red of normal hcmoglobin that shows through as pink in the skin of most Caucasians.

Once he had the enzyme deficiency isolated, methyleneblue sprang to Cawein's mind as the "perfectly obvious" antidote. Some of the blue people thought the doctor was slightly addled for suggesting that a blue dye could turn them pink. But Cawein knew from earlier studies that the body has an alternative method of converting methemoglobin back to normal. Activating it requires adding to the blood a substance that acts as an "electron donor." Many substances do this, but Cawein chose methylene blue because it had been used successfully and safely in other cases and because it acts quickly.

Cawein packed his black bag and rounded up Nurse Pendergrass for the big event. They went over to Patrick and Rachel Ritchie's house and injected each of them with 100 milligrams of methylene blue.

''Within a few minutes. the blue color was gone from their skin," the doctor said. "For the first time in their lives, they were pink. They were delighted."

"They changed colors!" remembered Pendergrass. "It was really something exciting to see."

The doctor gave each blue family a supply of methylene blue tablets to take as a daily pill. The drug's effects are temporary, as methylene blue is normally excreted in the urine. One day, one of the older mountain men cornered the doctor. "I can see that old blue running out of my skin," he confided.

Before Cawein ended his study of the blue people, he returned to the mountains to patch together the long and twisted journey of Martin Fugate's recessive gene. From a history of Perry County and some Fugate family Bibles listing ancestors, Cawein has constructed a fairly complete story.

Martin Fugate was a French orphan who emigrated to Kentucky in 1820 to claim a land grant on the wilderness banks of Troublesome Creek. No mention of his skin color is made in the early histories of the area, but family lore has it that Martin himself was blue.

The odds against it were incalculable, but Martin Fugate managed to find and marry a woman who carried the same recessive gene. Elizabeth Smith, apparently, was as pale-skinned as the mountain laurel that blooms every spring around the creek hollows.

Martin and Elizabeth set up housekeeping on the banks of Troublesome and began a family. Of their seven children, four were reported to be blue.

The clan kept multiplying. Fugates married other Fugates. Sometimes they married first cousins. And they married the people who lived closest to them, the Combses, Smiths, Ritchies, and Stacys. All lived in isolation from the world, bunched in log cabins up and down the hollows, and so it was only natural that a boy married the girl next door, even if she had the same last name.

"When they settled this country back then, there was no roads. It was hard to get out, so they intermarried," says Dennis Stacy, a 51-year-old coal miner and amateur genealogist who has filled a loose-leaf notebook with the laboriously traced blood lines of several local families.

Stacy counts Fugate blood in his own veins. "If you'll notice," he observes, tracing lines on his family's chart, which lists his mother's and his father's great grandfather as Henley Fugate, "I'm kin to myself."

The railroad didn't come through eastern Kentucky until the coal mines were developed around 1912, and it took another 30 or 40 years to lay down roads along the local creeks.

Martin and Elizabeth Fugate's blue children multiplied in this natural isolation tank. The marriage of one of their blue boys, Zachariah, to his mother's sister triggered the line of succession that would result in the birth, more than 100 years later, of Benjamin Stacy.

When Benjamin was born with purple skin, his relatives told the perplexed doctors about his great grandmother Luna Fugate. One relative describes her as "blue all over," and another calls Luna "the bluest woman I ever saw."

Luna's father, Levy Fugate, was one of Zachariah Fugate's sons. Levy married a Ritchie girl and bought 200 acres of rolling land along Ball Creek. The couple had eight children, including Luna.

A fellow by the name of John E. Stacy spotted Luna at Sunday services of the Old Regular Baptist Church back before the century turned. Stacy courted her, married her, and moved over from Troublesome Creek to make a living in timber on her daddy's land.

Luna has been dead nearly 20 years now, but her widower survives. John Stacy still lives on Lick Branch of Ball Creek. His two room log cabin sits in the middle of Laurel Fork Hollow. Luna is buried at the top of the hollow. Stacy's son has built a modern house next door, but the old logger won't hear of leaving the cabin he built with timber he personally cut and hewed for Luna and their 13 children.

Stacy recalls that his father-inlaw, Levy Fugate, was "part of the family that showed blue. All them old fellers way back then was blue. One of 'em I remember seeing him when I was just a boy "Blue Anze", they called him. Most of them old people went by that name the blue Fugates. It run in that generation who lived up and down Ball [Creek]."

"They looked like anybody else, 'cept they had the blue color," Stacy says, sitting in a chair in his plaid flannel shirt and suspenders, next to a cardboard box where a small black piglet, kept as a pet, is squealing for his bottle. "I couldn't tell you what caused it."

The only thing Stacy can't or won't remember is that his wife Luna was blue. When asked ahout it, he shakes his head and stares steadfastly ahead. It would be hard to doubt this gracious man except that you can't find another person who knew Luna who doesn't remember her as being blue.

"The bluest Fugates I ever saw was Luna and her kin," says Carrie Lee Kilburn, a nurse who works at the rural medical center called Homeplace Clinic. "Luna was bluish all over. Her lips were as dark as a bruise. She was as blue a woman as I ever saw."

Luna Stacy possessed the good health common to the blue people, bearing at least 13 children before she died at 84. The clinic doctors only saw her a few times in her life and never for anything serious.

As coal mining and the railroads brought progress to Kentucky, the blue Fugates started moving out of their communities and marrying other people. The strain of inherited blue began to disappear as the recessive gene spread to families where it was unlikely to be paired with a similar gene.

Bewnjamin Stacy is one of the last of the blue Fugates. With Fugate blood on both his mother's and his father's side, the boy could have received genes for the enzyme deficiency from either direction. Because the boy was intensely blue at birth but then recovered his normal skin tones, Benjamin is assumed to have inherlted only one gene for the condition. Such people tend to be very blue only at birth, probably because newborns normally have smaller amounts of diaphorase. The enzyme eventually builds to normal levels in most children and to almost normal levels in those like Benjamin, who carry one gene.

Hilda Stacy (nee Godsey) is fiercely protective of her son. She gets upset at all the talk of inbreeding among the Fugates. One of the supermarket tabloids once sent a reporter to find out about the blue people, and she was distressed with his preoccupation with intermarriages.

She and her husband Alva have a strong sense of family. They sing in the Stacy Family Gospel Band and have provided their children with a beautiful home and a menagerie of pets, including horses.

"Everyone around here knows about the blue Fugates," says Hilda Stacy who, at 26, looks more like a sister than a mother to her children. "It's common. It's nothing.''

Cawein and his colleagues published their research on hereditary diaphorase deficiency in the Archives of Internal Medicine (April, 1964) in 1964. He hasn't studied the condition for years. Even so, Cawein still gets calls for advice. One came from a blue Flugate who'd joined the Army and been sent to Panama, where his son was born bright blue. Cawein advised giving the child methylene blue and not worrying about it. Note: In this instance the reason for cyanosis was not methemoglobinemia but Rh incompatibility. This information supplied by John Graves whose uncle was the father of the child.

The doctor was recently approached by the producers of the television show "That's Incredible." They wanted to parade the blue people across the screen in their weekly display of human oddities. Cawein would have no part of it, and he related with glee the news that a film crew sent to Kentucky from Hollywood fled the "two mean dogs in every front yard" without any film. Cawein cheers their bad luck not out of malice but out of a deep respect for the blue people of Troublesome Creek.

"They were poor people," concurs Nurse Pendergrass, "but they were good."

nowhere
25-09-2007, 09:49 AM
Awsome Read!;)

cathar
10-10-2010, 10:32 AM
bump

yass
11-10-2010, 08:07 AM
Interesting, thanks.

yass
11-10-2010, 08:08 AM
lols@thanking someone no longer here.

cathar
11-10-2010, 08:50 AM
The 2nd story on this thread comes out of Kentucky...

for those of you who might think Kentucky is a backwater here is a short list of people who came out of there,,actors :Johnny Depp,George Clooney,Patricia Neal,Harry Dean Stanton,Warren Oats,Irean Dunn,,,/// DW Griffith///Hunter S. Thompson///Mary Travers

llanfairpwll
15-10-2010, 04:16 AM
1st post -- thought the idea of underground tunnels is interesting. I hear a humm late at night that almost sounds like it is comming from underground.

2nd post -- I have seen a woman out shopping on several occasions that could be one of these blue Fugates. The first time I saw her, I thought she had some sort of large birthmark on her face as the bluishness is more mottled. It isn't an even blue color. The more that I've seen her, I think she just has a different color skin. It is hard to get a good look at her though, as I don't want to be rude and stare. I've never seen anyone like her before in my lifetime.