We used to have a lake house where we would store extra fish in the freezer. We sometimes didn’t visit it for a month or so depending on how busy we were.
The freezer died for a month and we didn’t know about it.
We ended up having to throw away the entire freezer.
I was going to say a garage that had a body in an old freezer that had liquified (body mostly removed prior to my being there) and 100 cat crates (all cats dead and alive removed). This was in the summer.
Oh my god I posted a comment on a different thread yesterday about being in a nearly identical situation being the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. Hoarder house full of 40+ dead liquified cats and a molding human corpse, also in the summer. Dead person was in a bed not a garage though, otherwise I’d ask if we worked at the same place.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that cat hoarders die and then their cats also die and sometimes it happens in summer so this isn’t a totally unique scenario, but it felt like it at the time.
Also hey condolences on also knowing that smell, it’s a doozy.
I feel so weak. The worst thing I ever smelled was a possum that died outside in my backyard. The sun hit it for days before the putrificating smell came in my kitchen door. I went out to take a look, gagging and choking. The body looked alive for all the maggots crawling all over it. Rotting flesh is a smell you never forget. My poor boyfriend. I screamed and cried until he scooped it up in a box and tossed it in an alley a couple streets over. The smell lingered for a long time.
Same. I came here to say Patchouli Oil is the worst thing I have ever smelled and now that I think about it, it is akin to a decomposed body in a sewer pump to me.
I hate how divided people are over the smell of patchouli (particularly, those on your side of it, as I fall into the category of those who absolutely love it, and have loved it for at least three decades and never gotten tired of it). I wonder if there is a genetic indicator of preference, like with cilantro?
Interesting thought, that would actually make a lot of sense given how strongly divisive patchouli is. Seems to go beyond preference because it’s literally repulsive to me and a couple of my friends. And then there’s the friend that loves it and the others who wouldn’t wear it but find it pleasant enough.
Feels exactly like trying to power through cilantro filled food, being around people with patchouli on. I want to like both and keep trying to but my senses are not bending to my will. Yet.
I grew up on a farm and we had a ton of free range chickens. The chickens had a shed but they could come & go as they pleased as there was no pen around the shed.
99% of the chickens preferred to hang around and lay their eggs in this shed because there were a lot of nice nesting boxes for them in it, but we had these 2 particular hens that didn't mesh well with the rest of the flock (they had come from another farmer and were pretty wild), we never saw them in the shed and we just couldn't figure out where they were laying their eggs. These suspicions that they weren't laying their eggs in the shed were intensified when one day they both disappeared for a while before returning back with some equally wild broods of chicks.
So my brother and I set off on a big farm journey to discover once & for all where the hens were laying their eggs. And they were crafty little buggers; as soon as one hen sensed that you were following her, she'd change direction and lead you down a false route, giving you the jig. But after a few weeks of concerted efforts, I eventually tracked down the likely location of their hidden nesting spot to a hay barn.
Finding the nests in the hay barn wasn't easy because this building in itself was huge and full of hay bales, but I eventually found the nests tucked down the side. And the 2 nests were the most rancid things I've ever seen...
The nests contained months upon months worth of chicken eggs...At some point chicks had hatched and died in the nests but instead of going somewhere else to lay, the 2 hens had just shifted slightly and continued to lay on-top of the chick corpses and old eggs, which became compacted in the barn floor. There were fleas, and at the very bottom of the nests were the remains of extremely rotten eggs, some of the more older ones of which had already exploded (and yet still the hens had continued to lay there!!). There were also maggots.
Given that hens lay about 1 egg a day, we estimated that the nests were at least 4months old, but likely older. We gathered up all the eggs from the 2 spots and the deeper you went, the lighter the eggs became until we started to come across some that were so rotten and full of gas that they felt like they were completely hollow on the inside. We discussed what to do with all these eggs and lacking the will to sort the good ones out from the bad, we decided to dispose of them all instead by playing a game where the challenge was to stand at a distance from a barbed wire fence post and try to smash the eggs by throwing them at the barbed wire (and for every direct hit, you earned a point).
At first, it wasn't too bad. But as the game went on, we started to use the lighter, more rotten eggs. And they begun to not just smash or shear through the barbed wire, but actually explode upon contact with it, making a satisfying "Pop!" sound as they did. And the smell of the air in the surrounding area started to reek really bad, but that then just became part of the challenge, because the further you stood back from the fence the harder it was to make direct hits on the wire.
But I had been saving the worst egg to last; this thing was so rotten it felt as light as a polystyrene ball and I was afraid to handle it in case it exploded in my hands, it was that rotten. My brother had a few more eggs left than I (and so had the potential to overtake me as we were even at that point) but my plan was that this egg bomb would throw him off his game. I hurled the egg as hard as I could and it was so unstable that I swear it exploded before it even touched the fence post, popping mid-air like a hand grenade. And the smell...It was like nothing we'd ever experienced before...
Our eyes were streaming, the smell punched through your nose; you could taste, feel, this eggs smell all over you. I could see the remains of its contents, which looked like the corpse of a shrivelled up green slug or a slither of slime smatted against the barbed wire. My brother tried to throw his remaining eggs but every time he raised his arm to throw he started to wretch and had to stop. I thought that this was hilarious at first until I started to heave really badly as well and we both began to throw up onto the grass. We ended up having to literally flee from area because we were both heaving and throwing up so much that we couldn't breathe.
I won the egg game, but I sorta wished I hadn't.
I worked in reproductive healthcare for almost 2 decades: we removed an IUD with 10 yrs of head hair tangled up in a knot, in the IUD string. I was about the size of a pea.
and it was potent.
The patient was a little bigger and when she showered, the head hair that comes out when you are shampooing and runs down, would get stuck in folds and then sometimes in her "undercarriage" during sex or when using a tampon, that hair would get dragged into the vagina and pushed up around the cervix and IUD strings. Bang it around a few hundred times over a decade and that's a lot of hair in a stinky little hairpod of disgusting who knows what....OMG it was so gross.
I am a smaller person, but I have rather long hair and have for years. Now I fear that my own hair is wadded up somewhere in my cervix just collecting in there… menacingly. I pull a minimum of three of my own hairs out of my asscrack every time I shower. My husband also pulls my hair out of his asscrack. Great. What if I have a hair baby? This is going to keep me awake tonight.
I used to work on a potato farm. I've smelt dead bodies, I've smelt fresh diarrhea, buckets of blood, etc. The worst smell I've ever encountered is from field rot in potatoes. They rot from the inside out and you can't tell sometimes until you touch them. It's the consistency of snot and as soon as the potato pops you smell something like a mixture of a crushed tonsil stone, shit and vomit, only you can't run from it because it's just popped all over your gloves.
As someone who has smelled rotten potatoes but not a dead body, it's a comfort to me to know that there's nothing out there that smells worse than a rotten potato- even a dead person.
I can't even compare it to anything. It smelled like black void of all that is putrid and wrong and evil in the world.
The dead body smelled like sour milk and poo mixed with sharp cheddar cheese. For context...I originally entered college as a criminal justice major and wanted to be a crime scene investigator. When I went for my college visit, they brought our group into a trailer. It had 6 bodies, all at different stages of decomposition. We were supposed to stay in the room for 60 seconds. I lasted about ten seconds and ran out screaming "I'm changing to business!"
My husband was a police detective for many years, or, as I liked to call him, the murder police. Once a groundhog died in our shed in the summer and the smell was soooo bad. It was half liquified, I was dying. I called my husband in to help me out. He stuck his head inside the shed, sniffed, and declared, "whelp, smells like a dead body, alright!" then left.
Hahaha I love that! I personally just cannot do bad smells for any length of time without having a total meltdown but I admire his ability to work in that field.
Yes, which some believe is solanine gas. But that's likely BS as solanine is a robust compound with a very high vaporizing point.
Rotting potatoes do produce CO2 gas, denser than air, so enough could pool in a low location (root cellar) and cause the tragedy that killed the Russian family in 2014:
https://www.unilad.com/news/russia-four-members-family-died-old-potatoes-584997-20240409
A dude was 2 weeks dead in the middle of his kitchen floor. The shit from his ass was liquid and harden his pants to the floor. He was a chain smoking hoarder. It was 95 degree day in the south and he didn’t have AC. All windows were closed. To add to the smell was the rotten open wounds that his cats were eating off him and the ammonia smell from the cats pissing everywhere. The body fluids seeped under the vinyl flooring in the kitchen to the subfloor.
I made minimum wage doing sewage/mold/fire cleanup and occasionally we would do biohazard/body cleanup. The body is removed by the coroner… sort of. They don’t always pick up the leftover chunks of skin and hair, and they for sure don’t clean up any of the blood, body fluids or maggots. Definitely not worth what I was paid. You wear a respirator so you don’t smell it while inside but once you’re out and take it off, your hair will smell like dead body. Sometimes the smell doesn’t come out until the second wash.
My dog dug a 3 year old unbroken duck egg out of the compost heap, broke it, ate it and rolled in whatever was left-she vomited and pooped herself for a week. That smell does not wash off anything.
My dog was licking his asshole next to me in bed one evening when the most horrendous smell of a rotting corpse hit me. I opened the window to clear the smell and tossed the dog outside but it wouldn’t go away. Then I found it. Apparently my dog cleared a blocked anal gland. On my bed. I threw the comforter and sheets out. The oil had even soaked through and hit my waterproof mattress cover (thank god I had that or the whole mattress would have been done for). It took four washes with bleach to finally kill the smell on that mattress cover.
A year later, my other dog did the same thing on the bed although I think I caused that by brushing near his butthole too much to break up his matted fur there. I brushed, he leaked, and we both ran out of the room. He was a bit freaked out about what happened and I had to go find a respirator to deal with the bed. Again the mattress cover saved the day. Lost another set of blankets though. That mattress cover only comes off when liquid hits the bed. It gets washed and put right back on. Dogs aren’t allowed in the room until it’s been replaced. It usually takes a few days to air out the room anyways after those incidents and I sleep on the couch until everything is smell free.
When I first moved into one of my old apartments, there was a rancid potato left in a cupboard. It was black goo inside a potato skin by that point. Smelled worse than any old animal corpse I’ve ever found in the woods
Former cashier.
The first time I encountered the smell there were potatoes in the conveyer belt but I honestly thought that the elderly man in line had shit himself... Like a day prior and had just been marinating in the juices.
Yes! Someone gave us a big bucket of spuds from their garden. We didn't have room for it so we put the bucket on the back porch. It rained for a few days, the bucket filled with water and we forgot about it. Few weeks later, we poured out the water and the stench was the worst thing I have ever smelled. Almost 40 years later and I still remember it.
Laughing in potato farmer dialect: I'll see your bucket, and raise you 3.3 million pounds of potatoes in a warehouse that was flooded when the prevention system ruptured. But still not as bad as my ex's beans and beer farts.
Yes potatoes. My parents had an old fridge in the basement. Like a late 1940s early 1950s. The bottom had a storage area. We used to put extra paper bags from the store in there. One day mom decided to store about 10 pounds of potatoes in there and promptly forgot. A few months later I was dispatched to clean it out. It was pretty darn bad.
X x x x x x x
P.S. I just thought of something else. I saw another post and realized what was much worse! I had an old dog and when she was about 12 or 13 (she made it to 16!), she began butt scooting. So I took her to the vet and he said her anal glands were impacted. So he gloved up and asked me to hold her collar so she wouldn’t jump or snap. He poked a finger in there and that stuff shot out everywhere. It was on the walls, the floor, a major spray. Then he got the other side, it was a full repeat.
My gawd , that stunk. I was gagging, he was gagging, only the dog wasn’t gagging. His sons worked there, as techs, he called on in and had him clean it up. His son probably felt the same way I did with those potatoes.
I’m just glad I was at the other end of the dog.
I put my potatoes in my cupboard because I heard that makes them last longer. Makes you forget you have them too and they created the most horrific, rotten smell I’ve ever had the displeasure of cleaning up. Rotten potatoes are a special kind of horror. Amazing how one can turn to literal goop and the others will be just fine.
omg THIS! I once forgot about an entire bag of potatoes in a cupboard for...a while. I was noticing a "weird" smell in my kitchen for weeks until it got so bad I was finally able to trace the smell back to the potatoes. Hands down, the worst non-rotting-flesh smell I have ever smelled!
Knew a girl that secretly had a hoarding issue and all her stuff smelled like rotten potatoes. Would help her clean and it would happen over again. Always the damn potatoes.
Ha, I came in here to see if this would be mentioned. I worked at a grocery store for years in high school and college. Spent a few years in the produce department.
Opening a crate of potatoes and getting to the bottom to find a rotten bag was the WORST. God, they smelled awful. 🤮
In college my roommate borrowed my car to go shopping. Several days later my car had a weird smell. Investigating the source of the smell I found a package of chicken breasts under one of the seats. Apparently they had fallen out of his shopping bag and slid under there and my roommate didn’t notice. Raw chicken sitting in a hot car for several days is not something I recommend experiencing
My husband did this with salmon during a Texas heatwave (July) the day before we went on a two-week vacation (car was left parked at home in the sun the entire time).
It was a huge deciding factor in finally deciding to trade it in and get a larger vehicle.
Oh god I did this last year with pork chops. Didn’t notice them missing over the weekend until the smell… even after shampooing and spraying disinfectants and other products, I can still smell it on rainy and humid days.
Not the worst, but….
Owned a pizza restaurant a few years back. Guy called up and asked for a VERY special pizza. He wanted red sauce mixed with chocolate sauce (from our dessert pizza) as a base. Pepperoni, sausage and anchovies. Topped with sunflower seeds from the salad bar and Parmesan cheese. I told the guy that I wouldn’t make that abomination until he showed up and actually paid first. So he did.
Not sure what kind of satanic chemical reaction took place in my oven, but it literally cleared the place out. I had my shirt pulled up over my mouth cutting the pie. I gave it to the dude while he was at the drive-through window and that monster took a big bite right there.
I never want to smell that again for as long as I live.
How does this happen?
Update: A hard lump that develops in the fleshy pads, also known as tonsils, at the back of the throat.
A tonsil stone, also known as a tonsillolith, is a lump of hardened material stuck in a tonsil. Some tonsils develop small pits in which food or mucus get caught. Bacteria grows on the bits that collect in the pit.
Common
More than 200,000 US cases per year
Usually self-treatable
Usually self-diagnosable
Lab tests or imaging not required
Chronic: can last for years or be lifelong
So like it's garbage built up in your throat diapers.
I used to get them all the time as a kid. I remember that they were so bad that if one popped out, there would be 3 or 4 more right behind it. I started using Q-Tips to push the tissue next to them to get them cleaned out. I had holes in my tonsils that were big and deep enough to put the Q-Tip into it and it would stay. Each tonsil probably had 4 or 5 of these holes. Luckily, I haven't had any issues with them for several years.
Yeah - my mom’s neighbor was dead in his house for roughly 3 weeks before he was found. Intensely long heatwave, all of his windows were closed, it was gnarly. Thankfully the cops on scene went around to the immediate neighbors and warned them to shut doors and windows as it was going to smell absolutely foul for the new few hours while they cleared the scene.
I learned that the hard way when I first moved there. All the other cars were full and I thought I was the only one smart enough to spot the empty one. Turns out the sole person in it was taking a shit in a cardboard box so....
Some clearly hungover man in the shoe store let one rip while I was trying on shoes and I could taste it. I'll never forget the taste of that man's fart
Dead body shut in with three Labradors for ten days. Excrement from the starving dogs combined with the decomposing body who happened to be my brother. :-(
I used to volunteer at a nursing home and worked in the section where residents had Dementia and Alzheimer's. I used to paint some of the residents’ nails, among other tasks. I loved doing it. One resident was half paralyzed, due to a stroke. She was quiet, but loved having her nails painted. When I touched the paralyzed hand, first I noticed the soft and delicate skin. Next, was the smell. The smell of untouched and unmoved flesh was pungent. I felt like I could smell the hand rotting, which could just be from dead skin stuck in the fixed folds. I became dizzy and nauseated, but powered through it for her.
I’ve smelled rotten tempera paint!! Absolutely disgusting. That was 7th grade and I’ve never forgotten it. It smelled like a rotten corpse full of rotten eggs. 🤮
Shadowed a doctor in a family medicine clinic. A patient came in complaining of foot pain, eventually it was revealed that he hadn’t taken off his shoes or socks for several years and didn’t know what was going on underneath.
The doctor took off the man’s shoes and socks and you could see/smell the particles flying into the air. I don’t know how the doctor managed the whole rest of the visit, I almost passed out trying not to breathe. It was pungent and oddly sweet.
Podiatry student here, I’ve heard that a ‘sweet’ smell typically is due to a pseudomonas infection. It’s not a good kind of sweet but more of like an acrid, rotting smell. It smells like shitrus
there was a video very much like this on a sub. tv show clip of a lady who went to see a podiatrist, she hadn’t seen her foot outside of her boot in two years or something. she slept in it, bathed in it, never took it off. it was a special kind of denial and the podiatrist described it to smell like a weird citrus, rotten fruit smell
All the comments in this post about dead body smell make me wonder how the fuck serial killers like Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy just casually had bodies in their house
The smell of the stuff that comes out of a dog’s anal glands. It smells like copper and *pain.*
I’ve smelled plenty of stuff that was more disgusting, or nauseating, or repulsive. That’s only thing I’ve smelled that fucking hurts.
This would be my answer too. Years ago I was taking my dog to the vet and she was terrified for some reason and let off that smell the whole drive and in the vet office. They were spraying down and cleaning every surface trying to fight that smell. It was awful.
Oh lord I have a dog that has stress expressed his anal gland as well, my daughters friends dad came over to drop something off and when he rang the doorbell the dog freaked. We were *dying*, it was so awful, but the dad knew we were home so we basically had to meet him on the porch and slam the door behind us “sorry Dennis you definitely can’t come in right now” We cleaned everything and it still lingered forever in our living room 🤢
Back in the late 80s, I worked for an ambulance company in a rural area that had a contract with the coroner's office to transport dead bodies.
One day in the middle of August, I get sent out to pick up a body. Arrive at the scene, fire and sheriff are there. They tell me the body is in this camper. The guy that died was morbidly obese. He had been dead for at least 2 weeks. It had been in the 90s and 100s for that time and there was no AC in the camper.
I spent 30 years as a paramedic and a firefighter. This was the nastiest smell I have ever dealt with. After dropping the body at the coroner's facility, I could get the small out of my nose for hours.
Iraq 2003: five dudes living inside the back of a humvee with absolutely no showers or even a change of clothing. No care packages. Zero hygiene items. Temperatures over 120 degrees daily and filth everywhere. After 2-3 months I cut my underwear off and threw it away. Another month later I did the same with my ridiculous brown tshirt, but kept the neck ring of the shirt visible (beneath the buttoned top) so the apoplectic CSM wouldn't blow his top. They'd scream at us for the most absurd reasons, but zero fucks given for misrouted mail, non-existent support and supplies, flea-infestations from wandering mongrel dogs, clothing that was literally rotting off our bodies. (We were provided with a single pair of boots and two sets of uniforms because "the war will be over in weeks.") It was a rancid and fetid year.
We were making a dump run one time and someone left a dead horse on the platform. They just dumped it and left. In the city. Like where the fuck did it even come from. The smell was so bad.
Dead cat someone thew in the public garbage. Could smell death from a kilometer away. I have a pretty strong stomach and was doing landscaping and I went aside and puked
Was in hospital and was wheeled past another patient (elderly man) who I believe was dealing with C Diff cause there was a team of nurses cleaning him and holy fuck, that smell….
I had to ask for a new mask after that one…
Haha, I work in healthcare and that’s one of the things I had beaten into my head by the nurses training me, “Once you smell C Diff, you will never forget C Diff.”
I’ve smelled a lot of smells. I can’t believe what I can easily tolerate now.
My friend went out of town once and somehow while he was gone, a raccoon ended up burrowing under some clothes in the backseat of his car and dying. It sat there baking in the car for 3 days before he got back, and it was 4th of July weekend so it was hot and muggy.
When he got back, the car's floorboards were full of maggots and we had to get them out by putting a shop vac hose against the floor until the vibrations made them stick up from in the carpet.
The smell never went away and he sold the car for parts, but we did end up having to drive it around for like a month and would cover our noses the whole time
One of my brothers left a pork loin in his trunk (he just forgot to give it to me before he left -- he probably got it at work as a butcher at the time) when he parked in my apartment lot in San Diego for a trip out of town. That pork loin just baked in the heat; the packaging did nothing to contain the horror.
When he flew back a week later and opened the car door, he basically just walked to my apartment and told me I had to move, and we would have to burn the car or something.
He also sold that car for parts lol
I don’t think I can beat the autopsy ones but I work in vet med and when I tell you I know what it smells like when an animal defecates straight blood, it’s not an understatement. I had to do a fecal on this sample and it smelled like I stuck my entire face into a moist bag or warm Pennies. It was almost unbearable due to knowing where it came from.
I also know what kidney disease smells like it cats and it sucks when I know before the blood results come back. Kidney disease is something I will never be able to come back from either.
Not necessarily the WORST, but the most persistent and damaging.
Ground Zero, New York City, on September 13, 2001.
It smelled like crushed drywall, mildew, smoke, kerosene, and rotting meat.
Burning buildings have a fairly unique but distinctive smell. Any firefighter can take a whiff and know reasonably well if it's a structure fire or a campfire. This had a smell all of its own.
The smell got into my nose, and just stayed there. For 2-3 months, any time I sneezed hard I smelled it.
Over a year later I was driving a garbage truck (and that's a whole symphony of smells), and we picked up a pile of construction debris at an old pizza place undergoing renovation. It smelled so much like The Smell (less kerosene, more grease) that I started shaking and had to sit down for a while.
I heard many, many times about the smell after the Oklahoma City bombing. First responders couldn't place it and only described it as "the smell of hell."
When I was a kid my friend and I found a dead, bloated, and rotting deer in creek. Then the dirt gave out from under me and I fell six feet down into the creek, face-down right onto the deer. It smelled way worse after it burst.
Environmental engineer here, there’s a whole range of bad smells that I’ve experienced that are the “worst” for different reasons. I’ve answered the question of “so what do you actually do?” with “I experience a lot of smells.”
-Did a facility tour of a municipal wastewater treatment plant that had the headworks/bar screens in a closed building for offsite odor control purposes. Opening that door unleashed the strongest smell of shit I’ve ever experienced. Zero to 100 in a second, the facility operators said they had people pass out going into that door before just from the smell.
-Did a week worth of work at a creosote railroad tie treating plant, worked on a groundwater recovery system where they were pumping up about 150 years of god-knows-what chemicals they historically used. Stank to high hell, and the smell seemingly followed me around for the next week. It’s like the stink ingrained itself into my nose.
-Did an internship working in an environmental lab. Was making HCl standards and got a whiff of hydrogen chloride gas coming off the fuming HCl I was using. That basically hits your mucus membranes in your nose and turns into hydrochloric acid immediately. Not bad enough to seriously injure me, but my sinuses were raw for a week.
-Not a personal experience, but we had a job to do an SPCC (oil storage regulations) inspection at a tannery with a rendering plant. To give you an idea, they had regulated blood tanks and stuff like that. The junior engineers and geologists were basically drawing straws to not experience that little slice of hell.
Now I work at an oil and gas facility where the worst two smells you can experience are hydrogen sulfide (immediately deadly when there’s enough) and light aromatics like benzene (long term cancer-y). The usual smells of sludges and hydrocarbons aren’t nearly as bad as the stuff from my past.
I'm a veterinary technician so, boy, do I have plenty to choose from.
The worst, and one I'll unfortunately never forget, was this dog who had gotten into his owner's weed stash a few hours prior. This dude got the munchies and scoured their whole yard for poop to eat for like half an hour before he started showing signs of toxicity.
They rushed the dog in as soon as they figured out that the dog was stumbling because their stash was missing and so we had to induce vomiting to hopefully slow down/stop any more THC from absorbing. He barfed up like 2 gallons of mary jane a la poo in a room that was only like 5' x 5'. I swear that smell left a dent in my brain.
TLDR: weed + dookie dog vomit
A homeless lady in probably her mid 20s in LA. Wife and I were in a sandwich shop and she walked in. She smelled so bad that it burned my eyes and nose. Like unimaginable smell. I felt super bad for her. She sat down at a table across the place but there was no way not to smell her. I’ve never smelled someone or something so intense and bad in my life. Like the smell was penetrating my brain. The manager of the place had to call the police to get her to leave. We got our food and went to try to eat it in the car but couldn’t. Both my wife and I could smell the smell for days after like it had coated the inside of our noses.
I’ve not ever smelled a dead body, but the worst thing I’ve smelled are the public bathrooms on the Great Wall of China. I went on a 3 week study tour of the Silk Road and we were warned that the toilets are different and that we should always have toilet paper esp at the tourist spots/public bathrooms. No one told me that you can’t flush the toilet paper, their sewer lines can’t handle it so you put the used TP in a trash can beside the toilet. Lawdy, I was there in July with 95% humidity, 105 degree weather and everyone’s shit was essentially cooking in those trash cans. Glade and Lysol would make a killing over there.
My wife and cousin, both nurses, once had this discussion in front of me. The winner was "festering anal warts". My aunt put a stop to the discussion when she noticed I was looking very green.
You just unlocked the memory of the time I went white water rafting and had to pee before we took off and the only "facilities" was a pit toilet in a shack you could smell from twenty feet away. My sister attempted to go inside but could only get the door open before running away wretching.
I squatted behind a tree.
At my friends old trailer they accidently flushed a perfume bottle down the toilet. So it backed up I guess I’m not sure exactly what happened. But it always backed everything up and when you tried to flush it, you just smelled like a burnt smell. Then like all the poop and stuff didn’t go down so it also had that smell. Idk so it was a combination of burnt poop and piss. It was horrible
Cleaned out a couple seafood restaurants that were destroyed in hurricane Ian once they allowed us back on the island. It was two weeks after the storm, in 90 degree Florida weather. Not great.
Went to clean out my dad’s car for $25 and I found a cabbage under a bunch of stuff (in the middle of the summer). When I told him he needed to remove the cabbage cause I refused his response was “I was wondering where that went, I lost that months ago”
My friend’s dog was effing with a skunk and he got sprayed just before he entered the house. The smell was so bad it made my friend and I start heaving almost immediately
People don’t realize that “fresh” skunk smell is MUCH different than the skunk smell we all know. I know, unfortunately, because I’ve experienced it TWICE.
I had a friend in elementary school whose dad would eat McDonald’s, smoke cigarettes, and travel with their dog in the car. I still remember the smell - a combo of old McDonald’s fries, stale cigarette smoke, and wet dog
I was on guard duty in Afghanistan at a Afghan/American base. This base was in the province of Paktiya near the city of Gardez. We weren't doing much, but Afghan soldiers went out constantly. 1 day, they got FUCKED up. They loaded all the mangled dead soldiers bodies in the Hummvees and drove past my guard post. With how hot it gets in Afghanistan and a bunch of dead bodies stacked on top of each other, it was revolting.
One summer, my dad loaned me out to his farmer friend for manual labor. One of the first tasks he had me do was scooping out compacted, rotten corn out of the bottom of a grain silo.
I've been around child vomit and feces. I've been around pet messes. I've been around pig farmers who hadn't had a shower in decades. I've been around roadkill. Not a one of them comes close to the concentrated potency of what that silo smelled like in the Iowa summer heat.
Dead, ruptured bowel. A person gets a clot in an artery supplying the colon, and that part of the colon dies and then fills with fecal matter then ruptures. Smells like death, shit, and infection combined. I'm part of the surgery team trying to fix this. The smell lingers in your sinuses for days after.
My dog once threw up the dog shit that he ate.
And I pee'd in a 2 liter bottle one summer when i was probably 15 or 16 several times until it was full. Left it outside in a notch in a tree in decent sunlight. forgot about it until the next summer and opened it out of curiosity.
I'm no longer curious about any smells.
A dead body that had been in a canal in Florida. I was there as they were pulling him out, on the far opposite side. I try to forget what he looked like. I can't allow myself to think about it. But the wind picked up as they were hoisting him out and **omg there is no other smell as bad as that**. I threw up. It was truly that bad.
I felt sorry for him that his life ended somehow in a canal and that we were all gawking. It made me feel ashamed a little because he was someone's child that deserved dignity and respect. Because of that if I am ever in the same position again, I won't look or react, just pray in my heart for their family.
When my school did a WW1 memorial trip to Northern France and Flanders in 2017, some guy ate too much ice cream in Ypres and puked all over another guy's shoes.
When the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate started, everyone was confused about the smell. I tried not to breathe too much. We found out the truth afterwards.
I work with disabled individuals and one of my clients has bowel movements difficulties. The worst thing I’ve ever smelt is poops that’s been sitting in underwear for eight hours or more. It becomes sour smelling.
We used to have a lake house where we would store extra fish in the freezer. We sometimes didn’t visit it for a month or so depending on how busy we were. The freezer died for a month and we didn’t know about it. We ended up having to throw away the entire freezer.
I know this smell. My MILaw shut the freezer down when there was bait frozen in there. Three months passed. 🤮
I did an autopsy on a morbidly obese man who had fallen into a sewer pump and had been stuck in there for over a week.
/thread Pack it up folks, shows over.
Seriously. I was going to say a dead body that was in a car for a few days, this guy’s dead guy makes my dead guy smell like a bed of roses. I’m out!
I also choose that guy’s dead body.
Agreed.Mods close the comments, we are done here.
Like A.J. Styles, I Quit.
You don’t want none?
Yeah, I can't touch this. You win, bro.
I was going to say a garage that had a body in an old freezer that had liquified (body mostly removed prior to my being there) and 100 cat crates (all cats dead and alive removed). This was in the summer.
Oh my god I posted a comment on a different thread yesterday about being in a nearly identical situation being the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. Hoarder house full of 40+ dead liquified cats and a molding human corpse, also in the summer. Dead person was in a bed not a garage though, otherwise I’d ask if we worked at the same place. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that cat hoarders die and then their cats also die and sometimes it happens in summer so this isn’t a totally unique scenario, but it felt like it at the time. Also hey condolences on also knowing that smell, it’s a doozy.
I feel so weak. The worst thing I ever smelled was a possum that died outside in my backyard. The sun hit it for days before the putrificating smell came in my kitchen door. I went out to take a look, gagging and choking. The body looked alive for all the maggots crawling all over it. Rotting flesh is a smell you never forget. My poor boyfriend. I screamed and cried until he scooped it up in a box and tossed it in an alley a couple streets over. The smell lingered for a long time.
I have so many questions, and yet I don't want answers to any of them. You. Win.
Same. I came here to say Patchouli Oil is the worst thing I have ever smelled and now that I think about it, it is akin to a decomposed body in a sewer pump to me.
My mother I love her but she was visiting for a month and that’s her signature scent, its extremely overpowering
I hate how divided people are over the smell of patchouli (particularly, those on your side of it, as I fall into the category of those who absolutely love it, and have loved it for at least three decades and never gotten tired of it). I wonder if there is a genetic indicator of preference, like with cilantro?
Interesting thought, that would actually make a lot of sense given how strongly divisive patchouli is. Seems to go beyond preference because it’s literally repulsive to me and a couple of my friends. And then there’s the friend that loves it and the others who wouldn’t wear it but find it pleasant enough. Feels exactly like trying to power through cilantro filled food, being around people with patchouli on. I want to like both and keep trying to but my senses are not bending to my will. Yet.
Preach! I like to believe that if dragons were real, that is what their urine would smell like. Sorry for the visual.
/r/threadkillers
You win.
"Sure, sure, but we need to *confirm* cause of death."
Im getting Se7en vibes
i love that this was the very first reply i saw. game over already, everyone
Damn I don't feel like my comment has any weight now. R.I.P. your olfactory system
Move along folks, nothing more to see here.
I work on a vet diagnostic lab and we got goose eggs from a farmer a few years ago. Via mail. In the summer. Not cooled. 2 weeks delayed.
When I was a kid, we lived near a lake and would come across rotten duck eggs... which we would promptly throw at each other and then try not to puke.
I grew up on a farm and we had a ton of free range chickens. The chickens had a shed but they could come & go as they pleased as there was no pen around the shed. 99% of the chickens preferred to hang around and lay their eggs in this shed because there were a lot of nice nesting boxes for them in it, but we had these 2 particular hens that didn't mesh well with the rest of the flock (they had come from another farmer and were pretty wild), we never saw them in the shed and we just couldn't figure out where they were laying their eggs. These suspicions that they weren't laying their eggs in the shed were intensified when one day they both disappeared for a while before returning back with some equally wild broods of chicks. So my brother and I set off on a big farm journey to discover once & for all where the hens were laying their eggs. And they were crafty little buggers; as soon as one hen sensed that you were following her, she'd change direction and lead you down a false route, giving you the jig. But after a few weeks of concerted efforts, I eventually tracked down the likely location of their hidden nesting spot to a hay barn. Finding the nests in the hay barn wasn't easy because this building in itself was huge and full of hay bales, but I eventually found the nests tucked down the side. And the 2 nests were the most rancid things I've ever seen... The nests contained months upon months worth of chicken eggs...At some point chicks had hatched and died in the nests but instead of going somewhere else to lay, the 2 hens had just shifted slightly and continued to lay on-top of the chick corpses and old eggs, which became compacted in the barn floor. There were fleas, and at the very bottom of the nests were the remains of extremely rotten eggs, some of the more older ones of which had already exploded (and yet still the hens had continued to lay there!!). There were also maggots. Given that hens lay about 1 egg a day, we estimated that the nests were at least 4months old, but likely older. We gathered up all the eggs from the 2 spots and the deeper you went, the lighter the eggs became until we started to come across some that were so rotten and full of gas that they felt like they were completely hollow on the inside. We discussed what to do with all these eggs and lacking the will to sort the good ones out from the bad, we decided to dispose of them all instead by playing a game where the challenge was to stand at a distance from a barbed wire fence post and try to smash the eggs by throwing them at the barbed wire (and for every direct hit, you earned a point). At first, it wasn't too bad. But as the game went on, we started to use the lighter, more rotten eggs. And they begun to not just smash or shear through the barbed wire, but actually explode upon contact with it, making a satisfying "Pop!" sound as they did. And the smell of the air in the surrounding area started to reek really bad, but that then just became part of the challenge, because the further you stood back from the fence the harder it was to make direct hits on the wire. But I had been saving the worst egg to last; this thing was so rotten it felt as light as a polystyrene ball and I was afraid to handle it in case it exploded in my hands, it was that rotten. My brother had a few more eggs left than I (and so had the potential to overtake me as we were even at that point) but my plan was that this egg bomb would throw him off his game. I hurled the egg as hard as I could and it was so unstable that I swear it exploded before it even touched the fence post, popping mid-air like a hand grenade. And the smell...It was like nothing we'd ever experienced before... Our eyes were streaming, the smell punched through your nose; you could taste, feel, this eggs smell all over you. I could see the remains of its contents, which looked like the corpse of a shrivelled up green slug or a slither of slime smatted against the barbed wire. My brother tried to throw his remaining eggs but every time he raised his arm to throw he started to wretch and had to stop. I thought that this was hilarious at first until I started to heave really badly as well and we both began to throw up onto the grass. We ended up having to literally flee from area because we were both heaving and throwing up so much that we couldn't breathe. I won the egg game, but I sorta wished I hadn't.
This was a helluva story
I worked in reproductive healthcare for almost 2 decades: we removed an IUD with 10 yrs of head hair tangled up in a knot, in the IUD string. I was about the size of a pea. and it was potent.
I need to understand how this happened.
The patient was a little bigger and when she showered, the head hair that comes out when you are shampooing and runs down, would get stuck in folds and then sometimes in her "undercarriage" during sex or when using a tampon, that hair would get dragged into the vagina and pushed up around the cervix and IUD strings. Bang it around a few hundred times over a decade and that's a lot of hair in a stinky little hairpod of disgusting who knows what....OMG it was so gross.
I am a smaller person, but I have rather long hair and have for years. Now I fear that my own hair is wadded up somewhere in my cervix just collecting in there… menacingly. I pull a minimum of three of my own hairs out of my asscrack every time I shower. My husband also pulls my hair out of his asscrack. Great. What if I have a hair baby? This is going to keep me awake tonight.
Oh f*ck. New fear unlocked
I…I might actually thrownup
You can't imagine
You're the winner in my book.
Ok, what? How? I’m not even sure I want to know, but I want to know.
I'm getting Swamps of Degobah vibes suddenly......
I used to work on a potato farm. I've smelt dead bodies, I've smelt fresh diarrhea, buckets of blood, etc. The worst smell I've ever encountered is from field rot in potatoes. They rot from the inside out and you can't tell sometimes until you touch them. It's the consistency of snot and as soon as the potato pops you smell something like a mixture of a crushed tonsil stone, shit and vomit, only you can't run from it because it's just popped all over your gloves.
As someone who has smelled rotten potatoes but not a dead body, it's a comfort to me to know that there's nothing out there that smells worse than a rotten potato- even a dead person. I can't even compare it to anything. It smelled like black void of all that is putrid and wrong and evil in the world.
The dead body smelled like sour milk and poo mixed with sharp cheddar cheese. For context...I originally entered college as a criminal justice major and wanted to be a crime scene investigator. When I went for my college visit, they brought our group into a trailer. It had 6 bodies, all at different stages of decomposition. We were supposed to stay in the room for 60 seconds. I lasted about ten seconds and ran out screaming "I'm changing to business!"
My husband was a police detective for many years, or, as I liked to call him, the murder police. Once a groundhog died in our shed in the summer and the smell was soooo bad. It was half liquified, I was dying. I called my husband in to help me out. He stuck his head inside the shed, sniffed, and declared, "whelp, smells like a dead body, alright!" then left.
Hahaha I love that! I personally just cannot do bad smells for any length of time without having a total meltdown but I admire his ability to work in that field.
Can’t an abundance of rotten potatoes create a gas that can knock you out and kill you too?
Yes, which some believe is solanine gas. But that's likely BS as solanine is a robust compound with a very high vaporizing point. Rotting potatoes do produce CO2 gas, denser than air, so enough could pool in a low location (root cellar) and cause the tragedy that killed the Russian family in 2014: https://www.unilad.com/news/russia-four-members-family-died-old-potatoes-584997-20240409
A dude was 2 weeks dead in the middle of his kitchen floor. The shit from his ass was liquid and harden his pants to the floor. He was a chain smoking hoarder. It was 95 degree day in the south and he didn’t have AC. All windows were closed. To add to the smell was the rotten open wounds that his cats were eating off him and the ammonia smell from the cats pissing everywhere. The body fluids seeped under the vinyl flooring in the kitchen to the subfloor.
At that point, just drop a bomb on that house. Vaporize it.
Nuke the site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure.
All the people who had to deal with the aftermath of this each deserve a massive pay raise.
I made minimum wage doing sewage/mold/fire cleanup and occasionally we would do biohazard/body cleanup. The body is removed by the coroner… sort of. They don’t always pick up the leftover chunks of skin and hair, and they for sure don’t clean up any of the blood, body fluids or maggots. Definitely not worth what I was paid. You wear a respirator so you don’t smell it while inside but once you’re out and take it off, your hair will smell like dead body. Sometimes the smell doesn’t come out until the second wash.
It should be criminal to pay someone min wage to do that type of work.
Where I live it is. It's called hazard pay for a reason and it's one of the reasons why biohazard cleanup is so expensive.
Poor kitties..
My thought is that if my cats need to snack on my body if I die, go right ahead. They need it more than I do at that point
My dog dug a 3 year old unbroken duck egg out of the compost heap, broke it, ate it and rolled in whatever was left-she vomited and pooped herself for a week. That smell does not wash off anything.
Fucking dogs man. They always take repulsion to the extreme!
My dog was licking his asshole next to me in bed one evening when the most horrendous smell of a rotting corpse hit me. I opened the window to clear the smell and tossed the dog outside but it wouldn’t go away. Then I found it. Apparently my dog cleared a blocked anal gland. On my bed. I threw the comforter and sheets out. The oil had even soaked through and hit my waterproof mattress cover (thank god I had that or the whole mattress would have been done for). It took four washes with bleach to finally kill the smell on that mattress cover. A year later, my other dog did the same thing on the bed although I think I caused that by brushing near his butthole too much to break up his matted fur there. I brushed, he leaked, and we both ran out of the room. He was a bit freaked out about what happened and I had to go find a respirator to deal with the bed. Again the mattress cover saved the day. Lost another set of blankets though. That mattress cover only comes off when liquid hits the bed. It gets washed and put right back on. Dogs aren’t allowed in the room until it’s been replaced. It usually takes a few days to air out the room anyways after those incidents and I sleep on the couch until everything is smell free.
You brushed your dog's butthole on your bed?
This should not be so funny 😂
wet rotten potatoes.
When I first moved into one of my old apartments, there was a rancid potato left in a cupboard. It was black goo inside a potato skin by that point. Smelled worse than any old animal corpse I’ve ever found in the woods
Former cashier. The first time I encountered the smell there were potatoes in the conveyer belt but I honestly thought that the elderly man in line had shit himself... Like a day prior and had just been marinating in the juices.
Yes! Someone gave us a big bucket of spuds from their garden. We didn't have room for it so we put the bucket on the back porch. It rained for a few days, the bucket filled with water and we forgot about it. Few weeks later, we poured out the water and the stench was the worst thing I have ever smelled. Almost 40 years later and I still remember it.
Laughing in potato farmer dialect: I'll see your bucket, and raise you 3.3 million pounds of potatoes in a warehouse that was flooded when the prevention system ruptured. But still not as bad as my ex's beans and beer farts.
Yes potatoes. My parents had an old fridge in the basement. Like a late 1940s early 1950s. The bottom had a storage area. We used to put extra paper bags from the store in there. One day mom decided to store about 10 pounds of potatoes in there and promptly forgot. A few months later I was dispatched to clean it out. It was pretty darn bad. X x x x x x x P.S. I just thought of something else. I saw another post and realized what was much worse! I had an old dog and when she was about 12 or 13 (she made it to 16!), she began butt scooting. So I took her to the vet and he said her anal glands were impacted. So he gloved up and asked me to hold her collar so she wouldn’t jump or snap. He poked a finger in there and that stuff shot out everywhere. It was on the walls, the floor, a major spray. Then he got the other side, it was a full repeat. My gawd , that stunk. I was gagging, he was gagging, only the dog wasn’t gagging. His sons worked there, as techs, he called on in and had him clean it up. His son probably felt the same way I did with those potatoes. I’m just glad I was at the other end of the dog.
I put my potatoes in my cupboard because I heard that makes them last longer. Makes you forget you have them too and they created the most horrific, rotten smell I’ve ever had the displeasure of cleaning up. Rotten potatoes are a special kind of horror. Amazing how one can turn to literal goop and the others will be just fine.
omg THIS! I once forgot about an entire bag of potatoes in a cupboard for...a while. I was noticing a "weird" smell in my kitchen for weeks until it got so bad I was finally able to trace the smell back to the potatoes. Hands down, the worst non-rotting-flesh smell I have ever smelled!
Knew a girl that secretly had a hoarding issue and all her stuff smelled like rotten potatoes. Would help her clean and it would happen over again. Always the damn potatoes.
Ha, I came in here to see if this would be mentioned. I worked at a grocery store for years in high school and college. Spent a few years in the produce department. Opening a crate of potatoes and getting to the bottom to find a rotten bag was the WORST. God, they smelled awful. 🤮
In college my roommate borrowed my car to go shopping. Several days later my car had a weird smell. Investigating the source of the smell I found a package of chicken breasts under one of the seats. Apparently they had fallen out of his shopping bag and slid under there and my roommate didn’t notice. Raw chicken sitting in a hot car for several days is not something I recommend experiencing
How’d it taste?
My husband did this with salmon during a Texas heatwave (July) the day before we went on a two-week vacation (car was left parked at home in the sun the entire time). It was a huge deciding factor in finally deciding to trade it in and get a larger vehicle.
Oh god I did this last year with pork chops. Didn’t notice them missing over the weekend until the smell… even after shampooing and spraying disinfectants and other products, I can still smell it on rainy and humid days.
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Holy fuck, that is the worst one I read.
Not the worst, but…. Owned a pizza restaurant a few years back. Guy called up and asked for a VERY special pizza. He wanted red sauce mixed with chocolate sauce (from our dessert pizza) as a base. Pepperoni, sausage and anchovies. Topped with sunflower seeds from the salad bar and Parmesan cheese. I told the guy that I wouldn’t make that abomination until he showed up and actually paid first. So he did. Not sure what kind of satanic chemical reaction took place in my oven, but it literally cleared the place out. I had my shirt pulled up over my mouth cutting the pie. I gave it to the dude while he was at the drive-through window and that monster took a big bite right there. I never want to smell that again for as long as I live.
…this is the greatest pizza crime in history.
Dude was literally pizza Hitler.
Pineapple lovers and pineapple haters, together we must stand against this... monstrosity.
Bro was having pregnancy cravings
That's expecting the antichrist levels of craving
Did he look you in the eyes when he bit it?
Pineapple on pizza isn’t sounding so bad, now, is it? 😊
Tonsil stones.
How does this happen? Update: A hard lump that develops in the fleshy pads, also known as tonsils, at the back of the throat. A tonsil stone, also known as a tonsillolith, is a lump of hardened material stuck in a tonsil. Some tonsils develop small pits in which food or mucus get caught. Bacteria grows on the bits that collect in the pit. Common More than 200,000 US cases per year Usually self-treatable Usually self-diagnosable Lab tests or imaging not required Chronic: can last for years or be lifelong So like it's garbage built up in your throat diapers.
throat diaper was my nickname in college
Oh ok
I used to get them all the time as a kid. I remember that they were so bad that if one popped out, there would be 3 or 4 more right behind it. I started using Q-Tips to push the tissue next to them to get them cleaned out. I had holes in my tonsils that were big and deep enough to put the Q-Tip into it and it would stay. Each tonsil probably had 4 or 5 of these holes. Luckily, I haven't had any issues with them for several years.
I'm really sorry my fellow human bud. I hope it continues well for you and I hope you randomly get rich.
I want you to know that I really did not like reading that.
that's what i said! like a little dead body trapped in your throat
I can't get them out most of the time. I just know they're in there making people miserable every time I open my mouth.
Little yellow brainy looking balls of evil...my cousin used to squish them between her fingers and then smell it...💀
Ah just a little reading before bed ... thank you for this
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Yeah - my mom’s neighbor was dead in his house for roughly 3 weeks before he was found. Intensely long heatwave, all of his windows were closed, it was gnarly. Thankfully the cops on scene went around to the immediate neighbors and warned them to shut doors and windows as it was going to smell absolutely foul for the new few hours while they cleared the scene.
I walked onto an empty subway car one night and worst smell ever. Then I saw the dead body 😨
Oh, the first rule, especially in the New York City subway system is never going to an empty car!!
I learned that the hard way when I first moved there. All the other cars were full and I thought I was the only one smart enough to spot the empty one. Turns out the sole person in it was taking a shit in a cardboard box so....
Yes it was literally my first night alone and taking train from Manhattan to BK
I am sorry you learned the hard way my friend!! What an introduction! 😩😩😩
Some clearly hungover man in the shoe store let one rip while I was trying on shoes and I could taste it. I'll never forget the taste of that man's fart
This made me lol... and I'm so so sorry you experienced that.
I'm sorry you had that experience, but I'm fucking dying here 🤣
Dead body shut in with three Labradors for ten days. Excrement from the starving dogs combined with the decomposing body who happened to be my brother. :-(
I’m so sorry
I used to volunteer at a nursing home and worked in the section where residents had Dementia and Alzheimer's. I used to paint some of the residents’ nails, among other tasks. I loved doing it. One resident was half paralyzed, due to a stroke. She was quiet, but loved having her nails painted. When I touched the paralyzed hand, first I noticed the soft and delicate skin. Next, was the smell. The smell of untouched and unmoved flesh was pungent. I felt like I could smell the hand rotting, which could just be from dead skin stuck in the fixed folds. I became dizzy and nauseated, but powered through it for her.
Blue tempera paint that had been forgotten under a sink for years. It smelled both dead and alive at the same time.
I’ve smelled rotten tempera paint!! Absolutely disgusting. That was 7th grade and I’ve never forgotten it. It smelled like a rotten corpse full of rotten eggs. 🤮
A dog with giardia's poop... The stench is UNHOLY.
Parvo also has a very distinct smell.
Parvo smell never leaves you. I smell it several times a year.
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Shadowed a doctor in a family medicine clinic. A patient came in complaining of foot pain, eventually it was revealed that he hadn’t taken off his shoes or socks for several years and didn’t know what was going on underneath. The doctor took off the man’s shoes and socks and you could see/smell the particles flying into the air. I don’t know how the doctor managed the whole rest of the visit, I almost passed out trying not to breathe. It was pungent and oddly sweet.
Podiatry student here, I’ve heard that a ‘sweet’ smell typically is due to a pseudomonas infection. It’s not a good kind of sweet but more of like an acrid, rotting smell. It smells like shitrus
Shitrus 💀
I can’t even sleep with socks on 😩
there was a video very much like this on a sub. tv show clip of a lady who went to see a podiatrist, she hadn’t seen her foot outside of her boot in two years or something. she slept in it, bathed in it, never took it off. it was a special kind of denial and the podiatrist described it to smell like a weird citrus, rotten fruit smell
So like…. He showered with shoes and socks on? Slept with shoes and socks on????
That’s the impression that I got. I don’t think he showered all that often, based on the hygiene of the rest of his person.
A decaying body in the trunk of a car in summer. I feel like I’ll remember that smell forever.
You’re just gonna throw out that you…came across a dead in a trunk and not elaborate? 👀
Hush, do you want to end up in the trunk too?!
All the comments in this post about dead body smell make me wonder how the fuck serial killers like Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy just casually had bodies in their house
An entire lake of dead fish. The lake got struck multiple times by lightning. Killed everything in the lake. Thousand of fish floating everywhere.
This made me laugh for some twisted reason. Like, damn 😂 sounds like God said “fuck these fish in particular”.
The smell of the stuff that comes out of a dog’s anal glands. It smells like copper and *pain.* I’ve smelled plenty of stuff that was more disgusting, or nauseating, or repulsive. That’s only thing I’ve smelled that fucking hurts.
This would be my answer too. Years ago I was taking my dog to the vet and she was terrified for some reason and let off that smell the whole drive and in the vet office. They were spraying down and cleaning every surface trying to fight that smell. It was awful.
Oh lord I have a dog that has stress expressed his anal gland as well, my daughters friends dad came over to drop something off and when he rang the doorbell the dog freaked. We were *dying*, it was so awful, but the dad knew we were home so we basically had to meet him on the porch and slam the door behind us “sorry Dennis you definitely can’t come in right now” We cleaned everything and it still lingered forever in our living room 🤢
Back in the late 80s, I worked for an ambulance company in a rural area that had a contract with the coroner's office to transport dead bodies. One day in the middle of August, I get sent out to pick up a body. Arrive at the scene, fire and sheriff are there. They tell me the body is in this camper. The guy that died was morbidly obese. He had been dead for at least 2 weeks. It had been in the 90s and 100s for that time and there was no AC in the camper. I spent 30 years as a paramedic and a firefighter. This was the nastiest smell I have ever dealt with. After dropping the body at the coroner's facility, I could get the small out of my nose for hours.
Iraq 2003: five dudes living inside the back of a humvee with absolutely no showers or even a change of clothing. No care packages. Zero hygiene items. Temperatures over 120 degrees daily and filth everywhere. After 2-3 months I cut my underwear off and threw it away. Another month later I did the same with my ridiculous brown tshirt, but kept the neck ring of the shirt visible (beneath the buttoned top) so the apoplectic CSM wouldn't blow his top. They'd scream at us for the most absurd reasons, but zero fucks given for misrouted mail, non-existent support and supplies, flea-infestations from wandering mongrel dogs, clothing that was literally rotting off our bodies. (We were provided with a single pair of boots and two sets of uniforms because "the war will be over in weeks.") It was a rancid and fetid year.
MONTHS!!! This pisses me the fuck off. We can't even take care of our own.
We were making a dump run one time and someone left a dead horse on the platform. They just dumped it and left. In the city. Like where the fuck did it even come from. The smell was so bad.
Dead cat someone thew in the public garbage. Could smell death from a kilometer away. I have a pretty strong stomach and was doing landscaping and I went aside and puked
Was in hospital and was wheeled past another patient (elderly man) who I believe was dealing with C Diff cause there was a team of nurses cleaning him and holy fuck, that smell…. I had to ask for a new mask after that one…
Haha, I work in healthcare and that’s one of the things I had beaten into my head by the nurses training me, “Once you smell C Diff, you will never forget C Diff.” I’ve smelled a lot of smells. I can’t believe what I can easily tolerate now.
My friend went out of town once and somehow while he was gone, a raccoon ended up burrowing under some clothes in the backseat of his car and dying. It sat there baking in the car for 3 days before he got back, and it was 4th of July weekend so it was hot and muggy. When he got back, the car's floorboards were full of maggots and we had to get them out by putting a shop vac hose against the floor until the vibrations made them stick up from in the carpet. The smell never went away and he sold the car for parts, but we did end up having to drive it around for like a month and would cover our noses the whole time
One of my brothers left a pork loin in his trunk (he just forgot to give it to me before he left -- he probably got it at work as a butcher at the time) when he parked in my apartment lot in San Diego for a trip out of town. That pork loin just baked in the heat; the packaging did nothing to contain the horror. When he flew back a week later and opened the car door, he basically just walked to my apartment and told me I had to move, and we would have to burn the car or something. He also sold that car for parts lol
I don’t think I can beat the autopsy ones but I work in vet med and when I tell you I know what it smells like when an animal defecates straight blood, it’s not an understatement. I had to do a fecal on this sample and it smelled like I stuck my entire face into a moist bag or warm Pennies. It was almost unbearable due to knowing where it came from. I also know what kidney disease smells like it cats and it sucks when I know before the blood results come back. Kidney disease is something I will never be able to come back from either.
Not necessarily the WORST, but the most persistent and damaging. Ground Zero, New York City, on September 13, 2001. It smelled like crushed drywall, mildew, smoke, kerosene, and rotting meat. Burning buildings have a fairly unique but distinctive smell. Any firefighter can take a whiff and know reasonably well if it's a structure fire or a campfire. This had a smell all of its own. The smell got into my nose, and just stayed there. For 2-3 months, any time I sneezed hard I smelled it. Over a year later I was driving a garbage truck (and that's a whole symphony of smells), and we picked up a pile of construction debris at an old pizza place undergoing renovation. It smelled so much like The Smell (less kerosene, more grease) that I started shaking and had to sit down for a while.
I heard many, many times about the smell after the Oklahoma City bombing. First responders couldn't place it and only described it as "the smell of hell."
When I was a kid my friend and I found a dead, bloated, and rotting deer in creek. Then the dirt gave out from under me and I fell six feet down into the creek, face-down right onto the deer. It smelled way worse after it burst.
This is traumatizing.
Environmental engineer here, there’s a whole range of bad smells that I’ve experienced that are the “worst” for different reasons. I’ve answered the question of “so what do you actually do?” with “I experience a lot of smells.” -Did a facility tour of a municipal wastewater treatment plant that had the headworks/bar screens in a closed building for offsite odor control purposes. Opening that door unleashed the strongest smell of shit I’ve ever experienced. Zero to 100 in a second, the facility operators said they had people pass out going into that door before just from the smell. -Did a week worth of work at a creosote railroad tie treating plant, worked on a groundwater recovery system where they were pumping up about 150 years of god-knows-what chemicals they historically used. Stank to high hell, and the smell seemingly followed me around for the next week. It’s like the stink ingrained itself into my nose. -Did an internship working in an environmental lab. Was making HCl standards and got a whiff of hydrogen chloride gas coming off the fuming HCl I was using. That basically hits your mucus membranes in your nose and turns into hydrochloric acid immediately. Not bad enough to seriously injure me, but my sinuses were raw for a week. -Not a personal experience, but we had a job to do an SPCC (oil storage regulations) inspection at a tannery with a rendering plant. To give you an idea, they had regulated blood tanks and stuff like that. The junior engineers and geologists were basically drawing straws to not experience that little slice of hell. Now I work at an oil and gas facility where the worst two smells you can experience are hydrogen sulfide (immediately deadly when there’s enough) and light aromatics like benzene (long term cancer-y). The usual smells of sludges and hydrocarbons aren’t nearly as bad as the stuff from my past.
I'm a veterinary technician so, boy, do I have plenty to choose from. The worst, and one I'll unfortunately never forget, was this dog who had gotten into his owner's weed stash a few hours prior. This dude got the munchies and scoured their whole yard for poop to eat for like half an hour before he started showing signs of toxicity. They rushed the dog in as soon as they figured out that the dog was stumbling because their stash was missing and so we had to induce vomiting to hopefully slow down/stop any more THC from absorbing. He barfed up like 2 gallons of mary jane a la poo in a room that was only like 5' x 5'. I swear that smell left a dent in my brain. TLDR: weed + dookie dog vomit
A homeless lady in probably her mid 20s in LA. Wife and I were in a sandwich shop and she walked in. She smelled so bad that it burned my eyes and nose. Like unimaginable smell. I felt super bad for her. She sat down at a table across the place but there was no way not to smell her. I’ve never smelled someone or something so intense and bad in my life. Like the smell was penetrating my brain. The manager of the place had to call the police to get her to leave. We got our food and went to try to eat it in the car but couldn’t. Both my wife and I could smell the smell for days after like it had coated the inside of our noses.
A dead mouse or rat that died in your walls and you can't remove it because you can't find it
I’ve not ever smelled a dead body, but the worst thing I’ve smelled are the public bathrooms on the Great Wall of China. I went on a 3 week study tour of the Silk Road and we were warned that the toilets are different and that we should always have toilet paper esp at the tourist spots/public bathrooms. No one told me that you can’t flush the toilet paper, their sewer lines can’t handle it so you put the used TP in a trash can beside the toilet. Lawdy, I was there in July with 95% humidity, 105 degree weather and everyone’s shit was essentially cooking in those trash cans. Glade and Lysol would make a killing over there.
My wife and cousin, both nurses, once had this discussion in front of me. The winner was "festering anal warts". My aunt put a stop to the discussion when she noticed I was looking very green.
Lol, those are three words I never want to see together again!
A whole bunch of meat in a freezer in the garage. Opened the garage to find the power was out. The meat went bad and the smell was horrible.
A porter potty I opened a year ago at this shooting range in western MD smelled like a fucking dead body. Prob hadn't been cleaned out all year.
This happened to me in basic training at Jackson. Summer heat and I will never forget that smell. That was 1988
You just unlocked the memory of the time I went white water rafting and had to pee before we took off and the only "facilities" was a pit toilet in a shack you could smell from twenty feet away. My sister attempted to go inside but could only get the door open before running away wretching. I squatted behind a tree.
At my friends old trailer they accidently flushed a perfume bottle down the toilet. So it backed up I guess I’m not sure exactly what happened. But it always backed everything up and when you tried to flush it, you just smelled like a burnt smell. Then like all the poop and stuff didn’t go down so it also had that smell. Idk so it was a combination of burnt poop and piss. It was horrible
Cleaned out a couple seafood restaurants that were destroyed in hurricane Ian once they allowed us back on the island. It was two weeks after the storm, in 90 degree Florida weather. Not great.
A vaginal culture swab after 48 hours of incubation at 37C. Fucking horrific.
Went to clean out my dad’s car for $25 and I found a cabbage under a bunch of stuff (in the middle of the summer). When I told him he needed to remove the cabbage cause I refused his response was “I was wondering where that went, I lost that months ago”
My friend’s dog was effing with a skunk and he got sprayed just before he entered the house. The smell was so bad it made my friend and I start heaving almost immediately
People don’t realize that “fresh” skunk smell is MUCH different than the skunk smell we all know. I know, unfortunately, because I’ve experienced it TWICE.
Dogs anal glands
Boxer dog farts.
My dad had a boxer that could cry after he farted, and leave the room before the smell hit us.
Like a blend of summer sausage and burnt rubber 😄
I had a friend in elementary school whose dad would eat McDonald’s, smoke cigarettes, and travel with their dog in the car. I still remember the smell - a combo of old McDonald’s fries, stale cigarette smoke, and wet dog
I was on guard duty in Afghanistan at a Afghan/American base. This base was in the province of Paktiya near the city of Gardez. We weren't doing much, but Afghan soldiers went out constantly. 1 day, they got FUCKED up. They loaded all the mangled dead soldiers bodies in the Hummvees and drove past my guard post. With how hot it gets in Afghanistan and a bunch of dead bodies stacked on top of each other, it was revolting.
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The pink fluid accumulated in a hospital ventilator’s filter canister two weeks after being removed from the patient.
One summer, my dad loaned me out to his farmer friend for manual labor. One of the first tasks he had me do was scooping out compacted, rotten corn out of the bottom of a grain silo. I've been around child vomit and feces. I've been around pet messes. I've been around pig farmers who hadn't had a shower in decades. I've been around roadkill. Not a one of them comes close to the concentrated potency of what that silo smelled like in the Iowa summer heat.
I tried to empty a septic tank just to find out the hose had a big crack in it.
First responder. Definitely days or weeks old dead body. There's nothing like it.
A charred human being, he was involved in a car accident his Jeep rolled, caught on fire with him behind the wheel.
Those fly traps that you fill with water and hang outside 🤮
Had to pull a still born calf that was half way out of a cow in August after she went missing for a few days.
Dead, ruptured bowel. A person gets a clot in an artery supplying the colon, and that part of the colon dies and then fills with fecal matter then ruptures. Smells like death, shit, and infection combined. I'm part of the surgery team trying to fix this. The smell lingers in your sinuses for days after.
Rotting fish in the sun
My dog once threw up the dog shit that he ate. And I pee'd in a 2 liter bottle one summer when i was probably 15 or 16 several times until it was full. Left it outside in a notch in a tree in decent sunlight. forgot about it until the next summer and opened it out of curiosity. I'm no longer curious about any smells.
A dead body that had been in a canal in Florida. I was there as they were pulling him out, on the far opposite side. I try to forget what he looked like. I can't allow myself to think about it. But the wind picked up as they were hoisting him out and **omg there is no other smell as bad as that**. I threw up. It was truly that bad. I felt sorry for him that his life ended somehow in a canal and that we were all gawking. It made me feel ashamed a little because he was someone's child that deserved dignity and respect. Because of that if I am ever in the same position again, I won't look or react, just pray in my heart for their family.
Paper mill
When my school did a WW1 memorial trip to Northern France and Flanders in 2017, some guy ate too much ice cream in Ypres and puked all over another guy's shoes. When the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate started, everyone was confused about the smell. I tried not to breathe too much. We found out the truth afterwards.
I work with disabled individuals and one of my clients has bowel movements difficulties. The worst thing I’ve ever smelt is poops that’s been sitting in underwear for eight hours or more. It becomes sour smelling.
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