I just discovered a plastic cup full of sour cream 'n onion chip dip in my refrigerator.
It’s been there for six months.
I’m afraid to open it.
So my horrible tale of mold may have to wait.
Mold horror story #1
Years back as a kid visiting France, I bought a candy bar - like a Mars Bar or something. Bit into it, and found all this blue stuff inside. Yuck. Tasted horrible. Still recovering from trauma many years later. Scarred for life.
Mold Horror story #2
Here in Hong Kong during summer, it reaches 90F, with humidity in the 95% range. Even with lots of aircon and a dehumidifier, you get mold in video cassettes, on bathroom ceilings, etc etc.
Anyway, years ago I was living in a place where my room had a fan but no aircon. I did my Spring cleaning a bit late that year (end-September) and, from beneath my bed, recovered a pair of well-used running shoes that I had forgotten I had.
(The human foot, as you know, produces 29.43 liters of sweat per day, and I had been using these shoes pretty extensively for a year or so. Never bothered washing them or anything. )
At first, in the gloom beneath the bed, I couldn’t identify what the 2 furry objects were. But when I touched them with my fingers, pulled back in horror at the unusual feel, and found greenish-gray ectoplasm all over my hands… I decided to use a stick. The mold had even somehow spread onto the adjoining part of the floor. If there hadn’t been a pair of them, I might not even have guessed they were footwear. Just large hollow blobs of… mold, with moldy inside, mold outside, and moldy laces hanging from them.
In 10th grade biology class, we did an experiment where each student brought in a piece of bread. We dropped water on the slices of bread, placed them in petri dishes, and then put them in an incubator for several days.
It turned out to be my fifteen minutes of fame. Most of the other students had brought in ordinary American white bread. They got a few grey spots, nothing more. I had brought a slice of pumpernickel (sp?). The results were spectacular. It was covered with so much mold that we couldn’t even see the actual bread. Every imaginable color was represented: grey, green yellow, white, blue, red, and black. Some of the strands of mold had grown over an inch long.
Came home late one night from clubbing, put a crumpet into the toaster, spread on some butter, and bit into it… VILE taste.
Turn it over - strange large round burnt/dark spots on bottom.
Look at non-toasted one - bright green circles of mould all over it.
Spit spit spit in sink wash out mouth swill out mouth wash out mouth freeeeeeek out…
I HATE mould.
Are you sure that’s a Mold Horror Story, and not a European Confectionary Horror Story?
Yes Hemlock, that sounds eerily like my experience with an ill-advised Turkish Delight bar…
I won’t open containers that have moldy food in them. I either throw them away (if it’s the container the stuff came in) or, if it’s one of my own containers that I want to keep, I make my husband deal with it. He’s the Official Insect Remover[sup]TM[/sup], too.
Ain’t marriage grand?
I went to a relatively fancy hotel in Edmonton for brunch one Sunday about 5-6 years back (Chateau Lacomb for anyone who cares). I got myself a good helping of my favorite, eggs benny. Started eating it. Got 1/2 way through and my Mother told me to look at the bottom of the one I was eating. It was covered in mold, as were the other 2 I had on my plate. I didn’t even notice… the holandaise sauce was just soooo good. 
I was at a bridal shower we were giving my cousin, held at a fire hall up in Ligonier, PA. I opened the fridge to put something away, and saw a container of Cool Whip. Thinking I’d bring it out to use, I opened it-and there were colored specs everywhere. No fungus, or strands, just discoloration. I quickly tossed it.
In an office I used to work in, I had the unhappy chore of cleaning out the refrigerator once a month (office manager sounds okay until you find out the actual duties). I found many, many moldy things, but the worst was a plastic basket of once-fresh strawberries from farmer’s market. It was so covered in white furry mold that the cover was sitting an inch or two above the top of the container. Blobs of mold exploded out of the container vents. What was once pint-sized was now at least a quart.
My worst:
Coming home after a weekend away and finding out that the compressor in my fridge had gone on the fritz. The fan hadn’t, but the compressor did. As a consequence, the fan was blowing WARM air into the fridge rather than COLD.
I detected a faint odor when I walked in the front door, set my luggage down and opened up the fridge to get a Diet Coke – and encountered the absolutely worst odor I’d ever come in contact with. I swear, the smell was so bad it was almost visible. All the food had gone bad and was rotting even as I watched. Not much visible mold, but the smell clearly said everything had gone bad.
The worst part was trucking it through the apartment to get it outside to the dumpster – I swear it took a week for the smell to go away, and that’s even after the refrigerator was replaced.
(I gotta wonder if I snuffed out any budding intelligences that might have been growing in there.)
I just quit a job testing products for microbial contamination. Every now and then we’d run into some product that was packed full of mold. We grew it up on a petri dish of nutrient agar. After a few days, the dish would be filled with multicolored fuzz. Nasty.
My husband once got to take home from a college biology class a petri dish with a slime mold inside. He was told to feed it a little sugar. He had a packet of instant hot chocolate, so he ripped off the corner, sprinkled a little in the dish, and put both next to each other in a drawer. Then he forgot about it. Unbeknownst to him, he hadn’t closed the dish very well, and some of the powder spilled out too. A week or so later, he opened the drawer and the slime mold had gone to town - goo covered everything, and the powder was completely used up. He brought the whole drawer to the bathroom and scrubbed everything out.
Have you ever cleaned out the tray at the botten of your refrigerator. Most people don’t even know it’s there. I didn’t till recently, and I’ve had the frig for 12 years.
Look at the very botten of the frig. Mine was a little white tray at the very botten, covered with mold. I cleaned it with borax and baking sode.
Looking through my now deceased grandmother’s old chest of drawers, I found a little tin.
Opening it with curiousity and excitement, I soon found a strange, hellishly smelly green thing inside - turns out it was my grandma’s 50 year old piece of wedding cake that she’d kept since her wedding day.
I ran to the toilet and vomited from the smell. It was putrid.
As I unpacked my boxes for the start of sophmore year at college, I discovered that I had forgotten to empty the grounds from my coffee maker before packing it away for the summer. By September, an advanced civilization had taken hold.
After a very thorough scrubbing, I made a test pot. Tasted fine.
I had one of those tiny dorm fridges in college. Third year, I moved into a house with a couple other girls. We sat the bitty fridge in the kitchen and used it as the beer fridge. Flash forward to the end of the quarter: at this school, we got six weeks off starting at Thanksgiving and returning after New Year’s.
Since all of us were going home for break, I unplugged the fridge and started to defrost and clean it out. I just needed to wipe down one more time, so I tossed an old towel in there to come back to it later…
And promptly forgot about it… for six weeks. We all returned in January, and one roommate opened the bitty beer fridge to put some beer in there…
And screamed her bloody head off. She came running into the living room, screaming, “There’s a dead cat in our fridge! Aiiiggghhhhh!”
I go in there, peek in the bitty beer fridge to see what looks like a large lumpy, furry, black cat. Then I remembered my towel.
We took the entire fridge, towel and all, out to the trash.