I just spent 45 minutes cleaning out my disgusting, NON frost free fridge and freezer (shakes fist at the frost). I cleaned out everything for the most part yesterday (and parked it all in my future MIL’s fridge/freezer), and today, the stench still remained. What the hell could it be?
What it was was an oozing, liquified discolored packet of shredded cheese that somehow, mysteriously, slid under the crisper and oozed through a mystery hole. Also under the crisper: approximately half a gallon of sick, putrid cheesy-water.
I almost puked on the spot, but regained my composure to go and grab the vacuum.
I didn’t feel like mopping it all up (and only had one microfiber towel to boot) so I did the logical thing and grabbed the vacuum. You know, the one that’s NOT a wet/dry vac? :smack:
It sucks up about 2/3 of the water and then starts to slow down…the bag holds a surprising amount of water while the rest runs all over my floor. Yay!
It’s all cleaned up now, life is much better, floor is scrubbed and dry and so’s the fridge.
At a previous home, we had a chest freezer full of frozen chickens we’d butchered over the past year go bad one hot summer… Freezer was on the back porch where we only went to get a chicken for dinner, so it was out of commission at least 24 hours before we discovered what had happened…
Hazardous waste. It may have been the smelliest thing I’ve ever encountered.
It took about a day to haul all the putrefying, dripping with blood chicken carcasses out to a burial site in the back 40, then sop up all the rest of the rotten blood and other assorted melted body fluids. Hauling the freezer to the dump was the easiest part.
When we moved from Boxford to Grafton, we took our fridge with us (the buyers didn’t need it.) Our new home already had a fridge, so we put ours down in the basement as a back-up.
About a year later, my mom decided to start using it to hold drinks and stuff and so we went down to move it out where we could use it. I was wiping down the shelves when I thought I saw a snake curled up in one of the vegetable crispers. My mom saw it and screamed too. Then we both realized it was just a very old and very black zucchini . . .
Pretty sure it would’ve been illegal, or at least not accepted by our local scrapper - animal carcasses are hazardous waste and there are different laws about disposing of them than other types of waste. It may have been better just to dig a hole big enough to chuck the entire freezer into and bury the whole mess, but the other responsible party to this incident would not accept not getting the scrap metal money from the freezer. Sigh, glad my life is not like that anymore!
We didn’t have to clean it, but one summer we had an whole entire dolphin in our chest freezer. We used to send guests to go and get ice cubes just to see the look on their faces when they returned…
Well, I had to clean up maggots in the kitchen once. (Don’t let your dirty dishes sit around, kids!)
I figured I’d just steel myself and wipe them up, but found to my dismay that the bastards roll.
Had a somewhat similar experience, though it wasn’t my fridge. A guy had brought in to work a small dorm fridge he had in his garage. Problem was, the thing previously had some venison in the freezer part of it and it had become unplugged and been that way for months. You couldn’t get the smell out; it must have seeped into the insulation or something. We used it, anyway, for a while, but you had to open and close the door really fast. We called it The Stinkerator. It eventually became too much to bear and we chucked it.
A friend of mine had a huge party at his house with over 100 guests and served massive amounts of jamaican style ribs, wings, etc. All the leftovers and bones were tossed directly into his curbside 75 gallon garbage bin sans garbage bags.
He left the next day for a two week vacation.
The next day the trash collector came to empty it so when I stopped by it was empty but the lid was flipped open and it smelled horrible. I didn’t even look inside but just flipped the lid shut and rolled it back into his garage.
Several days later I dropped by to check on his house and when going through the garage smelled something awful. It was the trash bin so I decided it should probably be hosed out and dragged it back down to the curb, tipped it on it’s side and opened it while holding my breath.
My brain couldn’t make out what I saw and came to some odd conclusion that when it was sitting open on the curb the other day a nearby flowering tree must have shed thousands upon thousands of tiny white flower petals that stuck to the entire inside of the bin and now were sort of moving in the breeze.
Which was really odd because there was no breeze.
So upon bending over to peer into the bin to get a better look I suddenly realized what I was looking at. Thousands upon thousands of maggots.
Not in the kitchen, but several years ago I picked up my then-wife’s alarm clock, which had been sitting on a window sill for several months, only to discover that ants and their little ant-maggots had moved into it. What seemed like hundreds of little crawly things and thousands of little squirmy things spilled out of it before I could get it into a trash can. Then I had to clean up all the fallout. I threw that Dustbuster filter out when I was done, IIRC.
Not at all. I worked for a marine science educational institution. Each summer we ran a marine mammal course for undergraduates. The dolphin was accidentally caught by a commercial fisherman in the spring and turned over to the dept. of Fisheries, who gave it to us for the course. We had no room in the freezer at work, so i volunteered ours, since it was huge and mostly empty. “Frank” was there for a couple of months, until he did his duty as a teaching specimen.
When I worked at Disneyland, we had a communal refrigerator in the break room. One day it was my turn to clean it up.
Let me just say that giving a bunch of teenagers and 20-somethings a communal anything is a bad idea. Things in there were so old it practically chewed through the plastic holding it. The worst was the pasta. Someone had one of those styrofoam take-out boxes filled with pasta. When I opened it, I initially thought they had gotten spinach pasta…
The pasta was green for another reason.
We threw pretty much everything in that fridge out after that discovery
Putrified potatoes. One of my housemates left a bag of potatoes in the fridge and forgot to remove it before unplugging the fridge (he was the last one to leave) before we all went on vacation (spring break or summer vacation or something, don’t recall exactly).
I was the first one back. I opened the fridge door and was met with a wall of stink. The “veggie” drawer contained a plastic bag, some lumps and several inches of thick brown liquid. It was pretty horrific.
I must have poured it down the drain or the toilet, swabbed up the remnants with paper towels that were immediately bagged and tossed into the dumpster outside and then gone to work with bleach. Had to leave everything open including kitchen windows to let it all air out.
Two incidents come to mind:
One, I had just gotten home from the market; I was putting away all my frozen/refrigerated stuff. I put a whole chicken on top of the fridge while I put away something else. I forgot about the chicken on top of the fridge, until the smell, uh, reminded me. Ugh. So I held my breath and took it out to the curb-side garbage can. For the next two weeks my husband consistently forgot to put the garbage cans at the curb for pick-up. The smell by the end of those two weeks was indescribable! Did I mention it was summer??
Two, I noticed a funky odor in the kitchen. I cleaned out the fridge. Nope, smell was still there, even getting stronger. I cleaned the whole kitchen, top to bottom. Scrubbed everything to a fare-thee-well. Nope, smell was still there, even getting stronger. Finally, after weeks, I managed to track it down: a baking potato in a plastic bag had managed to roll under the microwave cart, all the way to the corner. By the time I had found it, it had liquefied. Ewwwwwwwww.
The first was broccoli gone bad. My mom bought some and stuck it in the crisper drawer, and promptly forgot about it. Since veggies seldom last long enough in our house to go into a drawer, none of us noticed it, where it sat for months. For a couple of weeks, we kept smelling something horrid every time we opened the fridge, but couldn’t find what it was. I never bothered to check the crisper, since we never put anything in it. Finally my mom remembered buying broccoli and sticking it in the crisper. I checked, and sure enough it had liquefied.
The story doesn’t end there though. Despite cleaning the fridge after disposing of the liquid mess, the smell remained. Did you know that if you leave milk in a fridge with no lid, it will absorb odors? I didn’t, and neither did any of my family. Every day the milk would get a little fouler, but since we were quite short on money, we didn’t throw it away. For a week I used that milk, until it got to the point where it tasted like I was drinking a bottle of really bad knock off perfume.
I unplugged the fridge, took everything out, and scrubbed it. First with straight bleach, then straight Mr. Clean, then bleach & water, then water & Mr. Clean. This didn’t get rid of the smell, only diminished it. I finally had to get a dozen boxes of Arm & Hammer, open them, and stick one on each shelf and on each door shelf. Took two weeks for the smell to finally go away.
The second thing I found in a cupboard over the oven. I save frosting cans to store stuff in, like chopped onion, left overs, etc. I don’t know how long this had been over the stove, as I rarely ever stored stuff there, due to the heat from the oven. When I opened the can, it was half full of a black tar like substance that had no smell. I put the lid back on and tossed it.
Maybe not the grossest thing ever, but it JUST HAPPENED 20 MINUTES AGO. I blame you.
I went into the kitchen to start dinner and noticed a… smell. A bad smell. And I kind of realized that I’d been smelling it for a while. So I took out the trash. Not it. I start hunting around and I find that in my little crockery potato bin there is… god. An ex-potato. It has turned… a color. And gotten very wet.
So wet, in fact, that unbeknownst to me there was at least half an inch of… fluid in the bottom of the bin thing. And there are big holes all around the bottom, to keep the potatoes fresher longer. So when I picked it up to dump the taters in the trash… oh my god it was gross. It was all. over. me. It was black. The dog didn’t even want to lick it up.
I changed clothes and cleaned myself off, but I still smelled. So I scrubbed harder, thought I’d gotten it, sat down next to the boyfriend and he said “Um… you’re still kinda stinky. You should change your clothes.” Which I already had.
I had to take a Silkwood style shower to de-nastify myself.
In one of the apartments I lived in in California, I had a problem with flies. I’d spray or swat them, but they’d keep coming back. Eventually, I traced the source of the infestation to a bag of potatoes I’d forgotten about in one of the kitchen cabinets. They had MAGGOTS on them when I found them and threw them out.
I have allergies to a lot of things, so my nose is often stuffy and my sense of smell is not very good. I suspect a normal person could have found the rotting potatoes a fair amount of time before I did.
Wow, some of these stories are gross. My story is nothing compared to them.
My worst was a 5-year-old bowl of lentil soup. My cooking sucks, but I keep trying anyway, so when I came across a lentil soup recipe that looked pretty good, I figured I would give that a shot. The outcome was predictable: the soup tasted horrible. I ended up with a lot of leftover in the fridge, but I never finished it because it was pretty bad. Now I had a dilemma: How should I dispose of a large bowl of leftover soup? In the garbage? In the sink? In the toilet? I’m very lazy and have a tendency to procrastinate, so I never got around to dealing with it, and the soup just kept sitting in the fridge. Of course, the longer I kept putting it off, the grosser it got, and I got even less motivated to tackle the issue. It got to the point where I was too chicken to find out what the soup looked like anymore, and I just let it sit in the back corner of the fridge indefinitely. Curiously, it didn’t stink at all. It all came to an end when I had to move 5 years later, and I had to clean everything out. It looked like all the liquid in the soup had completely dried up over the years, and the top was completely covered with what looked like a very thick layer of mold. I just threw the entire bowl out in the garbage.
Oh this was just a week ago. I had this little plastic container in the back corner of the fridge that I hadn’t looked at in months (maybe years?). As it turned out there was this soft, squishy, partially-congealed mass of black and white crud inside.
After a moment’s thought I determined that it had once been an onion.
