While I don’t have any stories to compete with those told by others in this thread, there is a reason that there is a sign on my refrigerator saying “Leftovers: Food Stored in the Refrigerator until it is old enough to through away”.
I’m assuming there’s not a whole lot of oven cooking going on in your house?
Ugh.
Some of these stories make my egg seem like it was dripping with nectar and honey instead of yecch and euugh.
I think the cooler story scares me the most so far. :eek:
My daughter was maybe 4 years old and we had just finished cleaning a deer that hubby had got while hunting.
After the cleaning of the deer, we gathered all the ‘innards and stuff’, and threw it into the trash barrel to be burned later that day.
About 3 weeks later, we could smell something horrid coming from somewhere. We narrowed it down to be coming from our daughter’s bedroom, and then narrowed it down even more to be coming from one of two chests of drawers that were situated almost over the heating duct she has in there. Let me add that we had cold weather at the time and the furnace was running this entire time.
When we opened the drawer, the smell was WICKED NASTY !
We found the deer hide that our daughter, for some reason wanted to keep, laying atop the clothes, rotting very nicely.
The entire chest of drawers had to be removed from the house and aired outside for days and days and days. The clothing in those drawers had to be thrown away. I finally had to wash down the inside of the drawers, and the chest itself, with ‘Odor killer’ stuff that hunters use when washing their hunting clothes…full strength, I might add.
Then, there was the time I forgot to get that gallon of milk out of the trunk of the car. Yes, of course, it was summertime. Very hot. I kept noticing a horrible smell when I would get into my car. The smell got worse and worse until I finally opened the trunk and found the gallon of milk had bloated to the point of exploding. All the rotten milk had dripped into the well where the spare tire was kept. Gads, what a mess that was to clean up!
You can hose out your car trunk, by the way…Just so you know.
I used the odor killer stuff on it, too…it worked quite well!
There is one more…the upright freezer in the garage became unplugged somehow. We didn’t notice until I opened it one day, and maggots actually came tumbling out into a massive pile on the garage floor…
Lets not even go there with the smell. The freezer was full, too.
I was fine until you got to the maggots. shudder
Wow.
The rancid breastmilk-soaked cloth which was in the diaper bag for a few weeks seems tame by comparison. Actually, with a toddler and an infant, there’s a lot of rotting milk going on in my house at any tme, no matter how vigilant I try to be.
This is exactly what I thought of when I saw the title of this thread. I am glad someone else was thinking the same thing, and created a link back to the original thread.
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Scallops, fallen out of my bag into the depths of the car trunk, for four days in July in Southern Virginia. God.
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A green pepper left on the counter in a plastic bag for about a week, forgotten. It was pure liquid filth when I opened the bag.
When my sister was little, she put one of her easter eggs into one of those little plastic eggs you can open up. It took my mother quite a while to find the source of the odor.
I once dropped a frozen dinner out in the car for a whole month. It didn’t stink, but the little plastic bag that the food was in expanded greatly.
I guess this counts: I was wondering what was smelling up our fridge about this time a few years ago and eventually found a container of mashed potatoes left over from the previous Thanksgiving.
This is why my parents started hiding jellybeans instead of eggs.
A few years ago I was taking a walk and came across an oak tree shedding acorns. I picked up a few particularly nice speciments and dropped them into my little black back pack - and subsequently forgot all about then.
That is, I forgot about them until I found worms on my credenza. I was rather non-plussed, even more so after finding more worms in my lbbp.
I have to credit 2/3 of these to Papa Doug, a depression baby who would not understand the concept of “spoiled food” if it leapt out at him and strangled the breath from his lungs.
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Tomato paste can left on high shelf in kitchen cupboard. Somewhere in the fullness of time, the can quietly exploded. An unknown span of time later, I was charged with cleaning the gooey black residue from the shelf, which I accomplished with repeated rounds of scouring pads and Clorox until satisfied the slime had been vanquished.
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Mysterious flies in the kitchen. We were swatting 'em right and left until I eventually traced the fly colony to a plastic bag of onions Papa Doug had stashed in a plastic mixing bowl and left on a table. The bowl was so discolored from rotting-onion effluvia that I threw it out after a vigorous scrubbing.
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The Mini-Fridge Experiment. My college dorm thoughtfully rented us mini-fridges without reminding us to empty and open them over break, because the power to the residence hall was routinely shut off. I came back to enough green, stinky mold inside my fridge to cure several contagious diseases and cause three or four more.
A friend of mine visited a farm shop to stock up with meat for her freezer; on the way home, one of the bags (which were all arranged on the back seat) must have tipped over and a half-pound wrapped pack of (raw, obviously) pigs liver slipped out and fell into the side pocket of the car door where it remained for some time. You can work out the rest of the story. <shudder>
This definitely isn’t gross like some of the others, but it sure was an unpleasant surprise!
A while back my husband and I picked up a growler of beer (a strawberry something or other variety, IIRC) at a local restaurant that brews its own beer. It had been sitting in our fridge for a while and one night in January we were on our way to a friend’s house and decided to grab it. We tossed it in the back seat of my car, on the floor.
We got to the friend’s and decided to go out for dinner. By the time we were finished, we had forgotten all about the beer in the back seat. A few weeks later I began to smell something in my car. For some reason, it smelled a whole lot like anti-freeze to me. I was really concerned, thinking my husband would be upset at me if my car was leaking anti-freeze and I hadn’t noticed it for a long time (I’m not so observant, you see). But it seemed that one day I’d smell it, and the next day it would be gone so I’d forget all about it (I’m forgetful, too, apparently).
Then one afternoon after work I went to get groceries. It was quite a cold day. As I was unloading the groceries at home, I noticed something foamy on the carpet in the back. I soon traced the foam to the growler of beer, which had frozen and exploded all over the floor. Thus the mystery of the weird, sweet smell in my car was solved. The smell went away in a few days.
In my husband’s undergraduate days he shared an apartment with two other guys. The hubby and his best friend are just typical boys—cleanliness wasn’t really a priority. For a while, one of the roommates was a neatnick and cleaned regularly, but then he moved out and was replaced by a complete slob, and conditions declined rapidly to a state of typical boy-apartment squalor.
One day, somone set out an entire chicken on a plate on the kitchen counter, uncovered—to defost, maybe, but who the hell knows? It kind of got lost in all the clutter and dirty dishes on the counter until I wandered into the kitchen and discovered it it one day. O sweet Jesus, it was a good thing I hadn’t eaten in the last three hours. Gagging and retching I carried it down to the dumpster and dumped it, plate and all.
The really weird thing was, nobody would take responsiblity for it! I called them all onto the carpet and told them what I had found, and asked who was missing an entire chicken? And they all disavowed all knowledge. I thought that was really weird. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Future Mister Fries because honestly, I don’t think that he’d know what to do with a raw chicken if you handed him one, much less that he would go out and buy one.
That left his friend and the total slob. I think the smart money was on the slob. But it was so strange that the responsible party wouldn’t just say, “Oh my god, total brainfart! I was going to make some chicken and dumplings and I . . .” Er, well, actually I can’t imagine what kind of distraction would make you forget that you have an entire chicken sitting out on the counter.
Gah, yes, I’ve had a forgotten item zap me. I use dried eggs in art projects and such; you take an egg and put it out in the garage and if all goes well the insides will evaporate and then you can do whatever with it since it’s stable. Weird, but cool, usually.
A couple of years ago I’d set out a couple of eggs to dry and then picked one of them to use. I put it down on the base of a potted plant by the back door and saw something shiny and forgot about it. The next time I went to water the plant I didn’t see it under the leaves, it got wet and exploded all over creation. Blamm! Stinking rotten egg so vile I nearly passed out before I could escape inside and then spent a half hour throwing up. Even now I get dry heaves thinking about that evil odor.
So, if you’re going to dry eggs, make sure they’re completely dry before they come into contact with moisture. A vital lesson for all people, I’m sure.
Bosda, HOW do you not notice something on the kitchen counter like that-did you guys go on vacation?
All right, when I was little, I loved to collect buckeyes, and once I brought a bunch home and I wanted to keep them, so my mother let me store them on a shelf in the living room for “just a little while.” We kinda forgot about them, or if we’d see them there, we didn’t really think anything about it.
Then we hit a cold spell and we had the furnace on, and the shelf was right next to one of the old-fashioned radiators. I noticed something on the shelf seemed to be moving, and I called my mom over.
Yep-maggots hatched. Yuck.
All right, this was stupid of me, but once I went somewhere (I forget where), and I had my period. Well, I changed my pad, and there were NO, absolutely NO trash cans anywhere in the bathroom to toss this thing, and I didn’t want to be seen carrying a maxi pad out in public, so I wrapped it really well in toilet paper and shoved it in a zipper compartment in my purse, meaning to throw it away when I got home.
I found it a few days later. I had wrapped it well, so it didn’t stink, but damn, that was a really disgusting little surprise.
When my husband was a kid he collected a bunch of baby frogs and put them in a shoebox. I guess when he got home the shoebox was set aside and he forgot about them, and it was eventually just stuck in the closet.
Years later he was cleaning out the closet and picked up a shoebox that rattled when he shook it. He opened it up to find little dried-up dead frogs.
Someone left my back passenger window down on my car when I was about 17. It rained sometime during the time that the window was open, but I didn’t think much of it. When I finally noticed that the window was down, I just rolled it up and went on my way.
Well, we were in Texas, with summer temperatures of 95+, and eventually the combination of water, heat and dirty carpet developed quite a funk. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was up, and went through numerous air freshners before I finally looked in the back seat (I didn’t ride back there and rarely had enough passengers to have to have anyone back there.) and saw about 2 inches of standing water. I tried scooping it out, but ended up just taking a hammer and nail and hammering drain holes in the floor. The car was cheap, and I knew it had no resale value.
Also, once in elementary school I took a tupperware container of cheese and crackers for lunch. By lunch time, the cheese had gotten warm and gross, so I just ate in the cafeteria. I didn’t want my mom to know that I’d wasted food, so instead of dumping it at school, or dumping it at home somewhere, I wrapped it in paper towels and hid it. Eventually I buried it in the backyard. That was pretty funky too.
When I was a kid, I hated the taste of milk. At age 33 I confess I still hate the taste of milk, but at the age of 33 nobody is forcing me to drink it anyway.
So anyway, I was a kid. I had a glass of milk that I’d been told to drink. I stuck it on my window sill, and closed the wooden shuttersso that you couldn’t see the window at all.
Several weeks later I opened the shudders and found a full glass of some congealed white paste. Amazingly, rather than smelling putrid, it actually did smell like cheese. And no, I didn’t taste it.
This other story doesn’t so much relate to the subject line of the thread, but it relates to the other posts in the thread so what the hell. I have a big-ass conversion van. The kind with the high top and the sofa that folds into a bed and all that. We used it mostly for road trips and vacations, and for those usually the dog was with us. So anyway, I notice that there are a lot of these weird bugs in the van suddenly. Little flying guys, kind of look like itty bitty moths, only skinnier. Didn’t know how so many had gotten inside the van… but whatever, eventually they went away.
But then a few months later I found something surprising in the back under one of the captains’ chairs: a little pile of exo-skeletons from the larvae of those damned flies… and the lace-like remains of the bone-shaped dog biscuit they’d called home.
Now this is a tale that’s been told on me and my sister since we were knee high to a duck. I don’t remember it personally, but since I still get embarrassed over it I figure the story is mine to tell.
I’m about a year and a half older than my middle sister. Mom says I was slow to toilet train, so we weren’t all that far apart. After both were trained the kid-sized potty chair was stored in a corner in the cellar. Apparently we girls found it there and kept on using it whenever we didn’t want to go all the way upstairs. Cellar was cool, and as long as it was undisturbed I’m told a film formed on top that sort of held in the odor.
Until the fateful day my father was doing some kind of work in the cellar and accidentally knocked the potty chair over, spilling the contents. Dad says he nearly got sick, and heaved until he got some kind of bleach down there to pour over it, and kill the smell.