The deceased was an older neighbor who I only knew as Joe. He passed sometime during the winter (the furnace was up at like 80) and wasn’t “found” until summer when the mail had piled up so high behind the slot that the mailman couldn’t get the new mail through the door. Must have been having some health issues because he died in bed on top of rubber sheets. So basically he just melted in place. The cops busted the door and puked; the folks from the coroner arrived – and puked. Me and another hippy were handy and the offer was made so --------
This was a stench that you could actually feel on your skin. Rot added to this caustic-soap-like smell. We tried all the old tricks (Vicks under the nose, cheap cigars) and it was still overpowering. I can still feel the gagging if I think about it very much. It was bad enough that the house was aired and professionally cleaned several times and it still sold for like 20% of its value at best and after all that cleaning you only had to spend 10 minutes inside to know something seriously wrong had happened there. I worked one summer as a honeydipper (cleaning out septic tanks) and that was lilac and roses next to this smell. When we finished, I stripped in the back yard and hosed down before going in to shower and I literally handled my clothes with a stick to bag them for garbage. Just what lingered on the clothes was enough to clear a room out if anyone had been dumb enough to take them into a room.
I gag just remembering it but one time my sewer drain in my basement backed up. The end result was a pile of toilet waste that I had to shovel (yep there was that much). The pile was bad. The “fresh” stuff underneath that got exposed from the shovel was even worse. It was a nightmare.
Yeah, we had a similar experience. Freezer downstairs had a lock that apparently didn’t engage. So the freezer was effectively left open for days. And Mom liked to stock up when she went shopping for meat. It wasn’t pleasant emptying out the results.
I’ve had a couple of mice die in the house and that’s pretty funky, but they’re small, so there’s a limit to just how bad things can get. So I’d have to go with the spoiled fridge meat.
A couple of years ago, a few weeks after Halloween. I was tasked with throwing away the neglected pumpkins, which had sat undisturbed for a good long while. Rather than being carved, they were decorated with little plastic doodads on metal spikes to make the pumpkin look like a cat, a bear, or what have you.
I went to pick up the first pumpkin to throw it in the trash bag. My hand went right through the skin like nothing was there. Apparently, breaching the skin increased the rot rate, and though everything still looked okay on the outside, beneath the skin was watery rotted mush. The pumpkin basically collapsed at the touch of my hand, and the rotten pumpkin odor hit me and immediately made me retch and nearly throw up; nothing has ever made me so sick so fast before.
I spent a few minutes fighting that urge down, held my breath while I picked up the remains of the pumpkin through the bag, and removed that sucker to the dumpster immediately. Of course, then I had to clean the puddled remains with paper towels, grappling with my heaving stomach all the while.
I have never smelled anything that awful, not even when my mother butchered chickens and turkeys in the kitchen. It was otherworldly. And I can’t believe how fast the urge to puke came over me; the smell apparently hit right on the button.
I’m certain there are plenty of worse things, and some of the chemists at work would say “this stuff makes pyridine smell like roses” but whenever I had to go to the solvent cabinet to grab a bottle of pyridine the smell made me feel nauseous. Ugh.
That said, perhaps I was smelling the melange of stank in the solvent cabinet and not just the pyridine, but whatever it was, it smelled awful.
When the winds on September 13, 2001 brought the smell of a crematorium to my door.
Second place when a car hit a skunk on the road running by my house. The smell woke me up, and since it was a Saturday night, the nice government animal control people didn’t remove it till Monday morning.
I had the pleasure of helping cut up a rotting whale carcass on a beach in New Zealand. The whale was a rare one (Tasmacetus sheperdi), and at the time, was only the 10th specimen or so ever found.
The museum wanted the skeleton. So a bunch of us went to obtain it. The whale corpse had been on the beach for about a week. Many of us had to barf in the bushes during the procedure.
The fun thing was that we piled all of the flesh-covered bones in a utility cart behind the truck. When we took the bones back to the museum, we were driving through a series of small towns. Looking backwards, one could actually SEE the smell wave as it hit pedestrians on the street. It was literally a wall of stench moving through each town.
Fishing and a huge snapper took the bait. Boyfriend (at the time) threw it in the tool box on the side of his pickup. And we all commenced drinking. Spent the nite, he drove home the next day hungover. And days passed and he didn’t remember the damn turtle. In Arizona in the summer at 110 degrees. I think he may have sold that truck.
The Kozy Kitten cat food plant, formerly in Pascagoula, MS. They would buy railroad cars full of the waste products (think fish heads, guts, shells, etc.) from the seafood processing plants all along the Gulf Coast and ship them to the plant in Pascagoula. Said rail cars would then sit on the sidings at the plant in the hot summer, southern Mississippi sun for days, even weeks, waiting to be unloaded and made into Kozy Kitten cat food. When the breeze blew from the proper direction, the stench easily overpowered the odor from the paper mill and sewage treatment plant next door.
In a distant second place would have to be your standard, run-of-the-mill rendering plant where large animal carcasses are cooked down in giant vats and rendered into soap, glue, and assorted other products. Nasty stuff I tells ya!
Working in the testing industry, we sometimes expose items to synthetic perspiration solutions, to see if the items will be stained/discolored by repeated handling. Yes, there are formulas for artificial sweat. Most are relatively inoffensive, using things like sodium chloride and acetic acid, but one test in particular required butryic acid. I have never smelled anything worse. Imagine that you had a locker room full of sweaty sumo wrestlers. Dozens & dozens of them. They’ve all just gotten out of the sauna, and none of them have bathed or showered in months. Now imagine that you collected all of that sweat, and distilled it down to the concentrated essence of body funk. That is butryic acid.
The company in question, a former employer of mine, kept this stuff in a glass jar, which in turn was kept in a sealed 5-gallon pale, in a fume hood that was always running, 24/7/365. You could still smell it faintly. If the fume hood was shut off or broke down, the lab would quickly start to smell like a high school locker room. If any human being actually smelled as bad as that solution, he would probably end up under quarantine, receiving food via a little hatch in the door, from people wearing sealed hazmat suits. I don’t know what the person who wrote that awful test was thinking. Perhaps they were going for a worst-case scenario; if so they certainly succeeded.
Thankfully, my current employer does not perform the test that uses this stuff.
Oh wow… reading your link describes leachate as basically decomposed landfill tea, as the garbage sits there and decomposes, and then rainwater percolates through it and collects at the bottom as leachate.
That has to be up there for worst stinks with QtM’s bowel story.
I worked a bunch of traffic accidents as a cop. I can look at body parts strewn over the landscape, and blood doesn’t bother me. But when the blood hits the hot concrete on a summer day, that odor will make my stomach heave.
One day while unloading groceries, my son left a packet of hamburger meat on top of the fridge while he was rearranging the freezer.
He forgot about it. For three days. It was green when we threw it out.
One year for Thanksgiving my SIL got a bad turkey. We were driving up as she was crying in the garage and getting in the car to go to Publix (all hail Publix) while BIL had to carry the bad turkey in a garbage bag out to the trash can.
I once forgot a package of steak in my car (from Publix, oddly enough) for 3 days. I only noticed when it began to smell. It actually only smelled vaguely musty, but it must have smelled impressive inside the package since I could smell it through the plastic wrap.
