My mother was in nursing school at Massachusetts General Hospital in the early 1940’s, and had the opportunity to experience all of the odors the human body can produce, dead or alive. But she said the worst thing she ever smelled, bar none, was after the Coconut Grove nightclub fire in Boston in 1942. The odor of the burned flesh of hundreds of victims was so overpowering, she said they hung sheets soaked in rubbing alcohol to kill the smell.
how about spoiled orange juice.
sweet, citric and putrid all at the same time
My old room mate seemed to think that an inch of any beverage left in the bottom of a glass was proper etiquette, especially when left in some unthinkable hiding place.
oh, and leftover spinach in a stainless steel bowl in the fridge for about 4 months. YUM!! the spinach actually etched the stainless steel.
a trick i learned was to freeze the offending substance in the freezer and it can then be disposed of nicely without having much odor.
iidkyimys, you should do an “ask the …” thread. I bet you have great stories.
here’s my contribution to the thread, all equally bad:
a) my dog ate garbage and had a case of the worst garbage farts ever. Most people with Boston terriers know of the horrid gas they can have. Well this was worse. WAY worse.
b) My roomate in college had a bowl of broccoli cheese soup. she didn’t finish it and put it in the sink. she then started to clean the house and place plates on top of it. This happened during the finals week, so we got busy and would deal with dishes later. Well, school ended and I went home. Apparently, she went home too. when we returned, the smell was so bad. When she lifted the plates, the broccoli soup had seperated and was foamy. To this day, I can’t stomach the idea of broccoli cheese soup.
c) For April fools, Mr Babs and I purchased a plastic poop. We also got ‘fart spray’ to make it more authentic. Well, he sprayed some in the room, to test it. OH MY GOD. This stuff was so rank we had to leave the house. I could still smell it the next day. Mind you, we only used a tiny bit. I can only imagine the horrors if we used it a la air freshener! To this day, I still catch whiffs of it. I feel so sorry for anyone that has to work at that factory.
We can’t decide if it was the best 5.00 we ever spent or the worst.
My grandfather caught this shark one time when he was out fishing. He caught the shark very early in the morning. The shark sat, dead, in the sun for the remainder of the fishing trip.
When he got home he hung the shark up on our patio. The stench of this was unbearable. It was to this day the single most horrid smell I have had the displeasure of smelling.
I even left my house because it smelled so bad. I went 2 blocks over to my best friends house. When I got there I and my best friend were able to still smell it 
A tooth abcess that bursts - I feel faint just thinking about it
I had never heard of the fruit until a couple of months ago. A friend of mine brought some to a church potluck. To give folks an idea of what this smells like, he had to make a general announcement that there was not a gas leak; it was just the durian.
I tried a little bit and found that it tasted like eating jack fruit with a mouthful of nickles.
I don’t need to try it again.
For my own contribution, I would mention a chemical called pyridine. Chemists used to tell me that there are plenty of worse things out there, but in the stockroom where I worked at the time, pyridine was the worst to me. It has its own unusual smell that triggers immediate nausia.
I was just going to say the burn ward at the hospital. My brother-in-law set himself on fire (DOH! :smack: ) and was in there for 2 months. Horrible stench - I had to run out of there several times to keep from barfing.
Now the worst thing I’ve ever eaten is Marmite…I had tastebud flashbacks for days.
Another one is a solvent called DMSO which smells like the world’s worst garlic fart. Because it penetrates body tissues very quickly, if you get it on your skin, you get the added bonus of being able to taste it as well. 
A house where a person had died on Friday and was discovered on Monday after a 90 degree July weekend.
The smell coming from Ground Zero on 9/12 was horrible, particularly cause you knew what it was. Human barbecue.
We used to own a great dane mix that grew incontinent with age. I’ll never forget the morning he jumped up onto my bed and deposited a huge stinking mound on top of my chest.
The smell emanating from a rendering plant is pretty darn foul as well.
Barry
When I went away to college, I left a lot of my winter clothes behind, as I was moving from frigid New York to balmy Mississippi. My clothes were in a dresser in the closet of my room in my parents’ house.
When I came back at the end of the year, having given up on that particular university, I went in my closet to look for something, and noticed a Wretched Stench emanating from my dresser. It wasn’t too horrible at the time, so I opened the top drawer - a little worse, but nothing inside to account for it. I opened the second drawer - and BOOM. An almost palpible cloud of Wretched Stench enveloped me, and I was forced to retreat to the living room to summon reinforcements. By the time I convinced anyone else to help me, the Stench had permeated most of the house. We formed impromptu gas masks out of old t-shirts wrapped around our faces ninja-style and ventured once more into the breach.
There was a mouse in the drawer.
There had been a mouse in the drawer for a very, very long time.
The mouse was no longer a mouse.
It was green soup, with a skull and part of a front leg visible.
We threw out the entire drawer and all its contents. We figured it was unsalvageable. We eventually built a replacement drawer using the third drawer as our guide, but to this day I am wary of keeping my clothes in dressers. I hang as many of them as I can up on racks, where mice cannot liquify on them.
Special offer pork chops that I forgot about. A week later I took the bag out of the fridge, and they had become part chop, part bacterial soup. I retched immediately as I threw them out, and I carried on retching for a long time afterwards. I don’t like thinking about the smell even now.
Stale gasoline. When we cleaned out the tank of the 1941 Plymouth I was restoring, holy cow for stink! Like stale urine, except that, being a petrochemical, it stays on your hands…
But the absolute worst smell I’ve ever experienced, so bad it was almost comical, was when our 1-year old daughter was exploring the back yard and ate a load of dirt. There is nothing to compare to the smell of the organic materials in dirt after they’ve been processed by a toddler’s digestive system. Jaysus.
Have you submitted this story to Darwin Awards?
I can’t say that I have smelled anything worse than the vats of old fryer grease I’d have to haul out when I worked at Burger King. One day I was complaining about the smell. One of the people who worked there was a World War II veteran who just came in during the lunch hour to keep the dining area cleaned up. Anyway, he told me, “you don’t know what smells bad until you’ve had to load dead bodies onto the back of a truck!” He described how hot and humid it was where he was doing this kind of work during the war. This story made me appreciate war veterans even more.
I think durian smells good. It tastes good too. Mmmm, durian shakes.
A rat that had died in the walls of my apartment, during the summer while the a/c was broken. Now its the water reclamation plant on base that always seems to be downwind. It smells sorta like raw sewage and feet.
Mr. Ujest use to play roller hockey in the back parking lot of his work.
His gear would be covered in sweat as he is quite the silver back male. I could, if so inclined, wring it out, but that is too icky to even consider.
Then he would change and place his stuff in a vinyl bag to proceed to put it in the truck of his car allowing it ferment and grow a culture all its own for a good several weeks in the hot July sun.
Enter me. Opening bag and being hit with this *smell * that I never expected.
I nearly hurled into the washing machine.
He, being a silver back, found this vastly amuzing when I told him.
I do not wash his hockey gear any more and some of it has mold on it now.
He wears it like a badge of honor.
I used to work a few blocks away from a leather tannery. The smell on summer afternoons, a sickly sweet chemical-and-flesh smell, was unbearable. I’d walk way out of my way to avoid passing by.
I understand the smell from Waste Management next door to the company I’m working for is pretty bad during the summer. I have yet to see…can’t wait!
I came upon a traffic accident that involved a truck hauling the leftovers from a rendering plant. The smell was so bad folks that stopped to help were vomiting. I accidently stepped in some of the liquid and had to throw away an almost new pair of shoes. The smell lingered on that stretch of I-5 for a couple of months.
Well, I had gone with my parents to a nice antique mall. Good stuff, prices ranging from $ to ‘Aieee!’.
But, eventually, nature decided to call upon both me and my Mom, so we wandered off to the Ladies room.
As we walked in, an older lady (early 80’s, late 70’s in age?) walked out.
And then the stench hit us.
Ya know how as we age, our sense of smell tends to fade away, and people are no longer quite aware of how they smell like? And how this tends to lead to that ‘old people’ smell?
This lady had it in spades.
Add to it she must have eaten something like cabbage, beans, etc. A lot of aforementioned foodstuffs.
:eek:
Even my Mom, who’s been a nurse for over thirty years was having problems: both our eyes were watering, our sinuses were trying to run away, and our stomachs were starting to warn us that an emergency evacuation may have to take place.
The worst part? There were only three stalls available in that bathroom. The one the older lady was in, and the two next to it. And the two next to it were out of order.
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