I was once stuck on a charter bus where the porta-potty backed up- not fun.
Then there was the time my wife and I had a houseguest for a few days. I came home from work, entered the house, sniffed, and then loudly said to my wife “One of the goddamn cats shit somewhere!” Turned out it was our guest’s feet.
Nope. It means ‘crap your pants’ (at least according to Urban Dictionary.) I didn’t know what it meant either & looked it up.
As for smells, rancid resturant grease is pretty awful.
A roommate of mine once cut loose with an emission so foul it actually turned the air greasy. We had to open the windows, doors and set an industrial fan I nicked from the sculpture lab up to create a wind tunnel. It took about an hour before all traces were gone. I swear it was the most epic fart I have ever encountered.
Catfish cheese.
No, it’s not cheese somehow made from catfish secretions. Indeed, “cheese” is something of a misnomer, although some form of cheese was used in the manufacture of the stuff. It’s bait. Bait for bottom-feeding fish that generally make their living finding rotten stuff at the bottom of murky rivers and eating it. That means it has to smell more rotten than all the other rotten things down there to attract them. There are different recipes, some more vile than others, but one way it’s made involves putrid cheese, rotting fishy bits left over from cleaning previous catches for the market, spoiled meat, and whatever other decaying bits of gunk you can find. I come from a small town where commercial fishing was pretty serious business, and there was a place that made the stuff in bulk. Huge vats of it. It had a nigh-impenetrable shield of funk. No one went near it unless they had to do business there; even dogs, fresh from a meal of cat shit and a refreshing roll in dead armadillo, would veer away when they got too close.
When our high school marching band practiced parade maneuvers, we had to keep to back streets with no appreciable traffic. One of those streets ran near the cheese factory, but at sufficient distance that passing it was merely gross, not horrifying. Until one hot late-spring day when we were marching by, and a freak gust of wind blew directly through the open doors and carried the full force of the stench out to us just as we were collectively taking a deep breath to start a song.
Cue nearly a hundred green-faced, gagging teens trying to stagger out of the blast area. A few actually puked. One of the tuba players didn’t even manage to gets his mouthpiece out of the way in time. It took him days to get that horn completely cleaned out.
I live here in the deep south. There is some kind of reddish fungus that pops out of the ground. Its like 3 or 4 thin spongy stalks that come up a few inches and connect at the top. Kinda looks like a single mixer blade. The common name for them is Devils fingers or some such. You can smell them for hundreds of feet away. I can’t imagine that smell concentrated/intensified.
A tractor-trailer full of fish overturned on the Interstate this morning. The fish weren’t biological hazards or anything; the main concern is the smell of an awful lot of dead, rotten fish. The crew had to spread lime to try to do something about the stench.
Might not want to go near Shippensburg anytime soon, and if you do, take Route 11.
Of all the smells that can be produced by the bodies of people and animals, as a vet tech I smell the worst of animals. While some smells can make me gag a little (parvo), the only time I ever actually wretched so badly I produced some of my own stomach contents was while making a little dog vomit up the contents of his owner’s bathroom trash. Condoms and tampons. I can’t describe the smell. My throat’s constricting just typing this. The owner was as trashy as her trash can. Poor little doggy.
And another dog came up and lapped it right up right?
One day I came up out of the subway at Finch station in Toronto. As I reached the mezzanine, I hit a wall of stench. I looked around; nothing seemed amiss. I exited the fare-paid area and headed into the tunnel leading to the regional buses. Incredibly, the smell got stronger. At the far end of the tunnel, a hundred meters away, was a homeless man. The smell was emanating from him. I can only guess that he had recently passed through the area I was in, because if he hadn’t, his odour was exhibiting capabilities of independent movement, reconnaissance, and attack that would do a stormtrooper team proud.
I have never smelt another human being ever who smelt like that.
While doing my stints on the switchboard on Mondays at the police department I regularly got to meet the drunks etc. who’d been locked up all weekend, waiting to see the judge. They’d try to lean their heads into the hole cut out in the glass and ask to use the desk phone, to which I had to say, “Sorry. There’s a pay phone down the hall.” I gave out a lot of change whenever I worked the front.
The miasma that pervaded my enclosed space had a feeling. I couldn’t actually smell it, it was so thick, but it burned the hairs in my nose. I’d heard/read that a person should mouth-breathe at times like that but I never did. I didn’t want to taste it.
I had campers feet which is similar to dishwasher feet. I was wearing my leather sneakers without socks all day and took them off in the tent. My tentmate couldn’t get the tent zipper open fast enough to get out.
So I was going to brag about the time I was at my local garbage dump in the salvage trailer and I squinked out a wee poof and then shortly after the kid who was nearby turned to the adult next to him and said ‘it stinks in here, Grandad, let’s go’. There I was, glowing with pride that I had managed to gross out a kid at the dump, but that just seems a little pale in comparison to the stories of smelly things I just read about.
The worst thing I ever smelled was the front staircase of my apartment house after my landlord managed to drop and spill the contents of his baby’s diaper-pail, which had been fermenting for several days. Not, I hasten to point out, a Diaper Gemie, bt simply a plastic garbage can with a lid (which came off, of course).
I have scrubbed latrines, walked around animsal lots filled with manure, and I grew up travelling to anf from New York City through the undustrial wasteland on the Elizabethy NJ oil and chemical refineries. But NOTHING smelled as bad as that bucket of days-old baby diapers.
I’ve spent time on a farm, been to Fresh Kills in the summer, and even as recently as this week sent my children screaming from the room in an unsuccessful bid to save their lives 
and driven by way too many paper mills in my life - one is too many - so I’ve encountered some stank.
I would caution you, Dear Reader, to pay heed to what I tells you now:
When your landlady at the apartment complex comes to you because you’re the only cop she knows and asks you to check on the man in 3-B because his daughter hasn’t been able to get him on the phone for 3 weeks in July in Atlanta, the following statements are advisable.
No
Hell no
No thank you
No way
Piss off
Fuck no
Fuck you
Go to hell
Hand me my gun so I can shoot myself
Do not under any circumstances open the door to apartment 3-B, for putrid, permeating hot death with flies waits inside to envelop you and push its way into your eyes, ears, clothing, and down your throat.:eek: Your hands or shirt are no filter for the insistent molecules that climb into your nose and sinus cavities, bringing a carry-on with them, for they intend to stay the weekend.
When you couple the olfactory assault with the vision of Mr. 3-B in a puddle of former human form laying on the floor providing a feast for young Musca domestica, you begin to question your entire reason for being.
My current mission is to never encounter that again.
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In general (95% of the time), when used indoors with medium ventilation, a third of a bottle will generate dry-heave-quality stench from one to three hours.
4th of July on the National Mall in Washington DC. Celtling, who categorically refused to use the lovely airconditioned hotel bathroom we walked past about 20 minutes before, now absolutely has to use the bathroom. Porta john was completely full and apparently had been for hours. The seat and floor were also covered with excrement. Now, what 4th of July on the Mall produces is not just any excrement. These are people who have been partying for hours. They are eating a lot of charred meat, and come from a wide range of cuisines. Many, many of them are eating hot dogs from the street vendors, and Slim Jims abound.
The line had been about ten minutes long; there was no time to find another option. I helped with her pants, and held her in the air just inside the door. She did her thing and I sacrificed a handkerchief. Worst. stench. ever.
I’ll also challenge silenus for the “Greatest Area” category. The Fairfax County municipal services do a LOT of tree trimming. In the interest of environmental. . .er . . .somethingorother . . . they trim the tree parts directly into a truck-sized chipper and then dump it all in huge piles near the waste station. Residents are welcome to come by and take away a truckfull of the resulting mulch for free.
In the Spring and Fall when those piles are most disturbed the acrid stench of fresh mulch fills a 2-3 mile radius. Not to mention all the neighborhoods completely taken over by it.
Freshly chipped wood must support a lot of yeast because the stench closely resembles that of homeless people’s feet. (But hat’s another story.)
Really horrid and - for a couple of weeks each year - impossible to escape.
My wife is watching DVDs of Bones, and I can only imagine if they ever release a Smell-O-Vision® version.
I bought a couple of mice for my python once. One of them chewed through his bag on the way home. It escaped in the car and I couldn’t find it. The next day, I turned on the AC and the fan made a “Food processor” type of noise. I thought, “Please, please don’t let that be the mouse.” It was.
This happened in June. So I had a fine two weeks or so of driving with my head out the window to minimize the impact of a chopped up mouse stewing in the 90+ degree heat in my AC.