# How come nobody SMELLED IT!

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-nobody-smelled-it/90929>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 1, 2001, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-nobody-smelled-it/90929 "2001-11-01T16:10:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Mort\_Furd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Mort\_Furd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mort_Furd)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2001, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-nobody-smelled-it/90929/41 "2001-11-06T21:00:54Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by reprise \*  
> \*\*While I don’t think anyone who’s ever been around a recently dead body would mistake the smell for anything else, in my experience it’s not a smell the average person would associate with death. To me it smells sickly sweet, kind of like over-ripe oranges. Something you could smell and be aware of, but which wouldn’t make you think there was any reason to batter down someone’s door unless you were familiar with the scent.
> 
> Our noses tend to go numb to familiar smells, so I can quite believe that people would have gotten used to a smell which changed only a little each day without necessarily registering that something was very wrong. \*\*

Right you are about it having a smell all its own. It is hard to describe. Something like a mixture of baked bread and citrus fruit and rot. My boss was in the habit of keeping quince fruit in his office as decoration back then, and I couldn’t stand the smell of the fruit after I found the dead guy.  
It wasn’t so much that my nose got used to the smell. I was out of the appartment for twelve hours a day, after all. There just wasn’t enough smell to be disturbing until that last evening there when I finally opened the door.  
Did I mention that I had gone to see “Army of Darkness” the night before I found the guy? Creepy. You go out and see a scary movie, and then find out the next day that you have been living one.

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