Have to go with electrified dog flesh. Worked in a veterinary office, and we had to use an electric knife to cut and cautarize at the same time a particularly nasty bit of flesh. The smell literally sent me gagging from the room.
Fermented (I would say rotted) herring, known as surstromming in Sweden.
In the strip mall by my house there is a really good Thai place that shares an alleyway with a really good grease pit (hamburgers, gyros, hot dogs, etc). They have a common dumpster, which on hot summer days probably causes roaches to vomit uncontrollably. It’s almost visable…….
I have never smelled anything as bad as my daughter’s diaper when she decided to eat some dirt. All those organic compounds, processed through a one-year-old. Jeeeeeezus H. Christ.
I once found a body floating in the Missisipi. He had jumped off a bridge four months earlier. It was finally warm enough for his body gasses to build up enough to make him float. It’s kind of a sweet smell. That makes you automatically gag.
Last year I chartered a 45 foot Morgan, a sailboat, and someone had used it just prior. We were out for three hot days on Lake Superior, and the waste hold wasn’t a solid tank, it was a bladder. When we were unloading, the charter master unscrewed the cap and made a hot shit geyser. It sprayed all over our luggage and the dock. Some had been fermenting for at least a week. The charter master got some in his mouth.
Sort of in the same vein, years ago I worked in the crab industry down in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, and we would take all the leftover detritus to a sort of catfood / dogfood plant there, that would then grind it up and I guess make some kind of meal out of it, then ship it off.
The process went like this: we’d back the truck up into this huge sort of unairconditioned warehouse and dump barrels of gunk out on the floor, where the rest of the community had also done the same. After a few hours, with a little frontend loader pushing it around, sometimes this pile of stuff would mound up over 10-15 feet. The crew there would then shovel it onto a conveyer belt that would take it to the grinder, etc.
That couple-hour old funk was bad enough, but on occasions the grinder would break down for a couple of days, and in the lower Alabama heat and humidity, man that was an atomic stink, probably even poisonous if you stood directly in it for while.
We’d also have occasions where our walk-in freezer or cooler would break down when we’d have it full of crab backs (for stuffed crab), etc. and we couldn’t get a repairman out quick enough and the flies would get to it, I’m talking dozens of those (55gal?) size barrels full of organic matter, oozing brown liquid filth out of their drain holes, and no joke, when we’d finally clean it out, the floors would be covered in inches of watery maggots and nasty, nasty fluid. Atomic stink I tell you.
Putrid human blood, oh boy, didn´t that stink… Stink like “I want to rip my nose off my face and gag my tonsils out and puke even my very first baby food” stinky.
Second prize goes for a strange crab I found on a summer holiday*, it was more or less dead on the beach so I thought it would make a nice additiong to my shells collection; so after it died I put it inside of an airtight foam ice-cream box for the reminder of the summer. I was young and dumb and didn´t know the wonders of anaerobic decomposition, I took a very quick lesson when I opened the box back home.
*It looked a bit like this crab but it had a very smooth exoskeleton, almost porcelain like, it was about 15/18 cm wide, including legs, and had a few spines/spikes on the upper side; if anyone can identify it I´d be grateful; I didn´t keep the specimen.
My high school Phd chemistry teacher, who graduated from Stanford, liked to demonstrate the different properties of the elements. She blew up a bunch of things like sodium in water or hydrogen, a balloon and a candle. But the most memorable was smelling bromine, or as she says “concentrated BO”. :eek:
I went on a temp job one time that took me to the warehouse of a Salvation Army store, to unload trucks of donations. They had a tractor trailer there, full of the possessions of a man who died in his home. I don’t know how long he lay there in the house, or anything else about it, but you could only get a couple of feet inside the trailer before you wanted to vomit. The stench was so repulsive, nobody could go in to get the stuff. I walked off the job. I needed the money that day, but not that much.
I’ve been all over China and India so I’ve smelled some really nasty stuff. The first time I smelled stinky tofu as mentioned by Leaffan I thought it was pig shit. I subsequently ate some, and it was unutterably disgusting. However, any of these experiences pale into insignificance compared to my top three, presented in reverse order of foulness:
#3
Something someone did in the toilets of the Mongolian Wok restaurant in Dublin. I was “caught short” while dining there, so I innocently wandered into an unventilated cubicle in the restaurant to do my business, closed the door, dropped my pants - then breathed in. Whatever had happened in there was unbelievable. I could smell it - and taste it - while breathing through my mouth. I was unable to do anything productive, and retched continuously and constantly until I could pull my pants up and get the hell out. Unfortunately there was someone outside in the larger part of the toilet who a) heard me heaving, and b) smelled the same thing I had. I tried in vain, in between retching, to explain that it was the previous occupant of the toilet who had done this… thing, but I don’t think he believed me.
#2
The smell of debris pulled from a reef onto which the tsunami had dumped an entire town and many of its human occupants. The fresh detritus exuded a sort of sulfurous, sweetly rotting stench that, every day, when I was diving as part of the clear up, got into to my skin and hair - that I could even taste in my saliva - that showering couldn’t quite remove. Beer helped. But the 7,000 tons of it that sat in a big pile for six months waiting for a barge to take it away was indescribable.
#1
Pork chops I bought from my local butcher as part of a too-good-to-be-true deal. I remember that it was precisely: 2 chops, 6 sausages, 1/2 lb bacon, 6 eggs, 1 loaf bread, and 2 pints milk, all for £3.99. Amazing. mrs jjimm and I shared the apartment with yojimbo, and we had most of it for breakfast at the weekend, but afterwards I forgot about the chops, which were tightly wrapped in their own blood in a plastic bag. Then I went away on business. After a few days yojimbo sussed they were going bad, and went to throw them out, but mrs jjimm said “no, you know what jjimm is like about keeping food”. So I came home to find these things that had been sitting on a shelf on the fridge for a week, and probably for a week or two before that in the butcher’s, and I sniffed them to see whether they were OK. I retched with the burping, rasping, violent potential of a full stomach-load coming out there and then. Realising I had to dispose of the bloody things, I gingerly moved them out of the fridge, then got another blast and did that thing that we used to call “bilking” - i.e. you puke into your mouth and swallow it, while making a sound that sounds like “bilk”. I finally got them into another bag, then another, then another, retching the whole time, and eventually put them in the trash and threw the trash out. Absofuckinglutely foul.
There was this hotel room in Guatemala, and one of the bathrooms had something REALLY FRICKING RANK rotting in it…
It was sealed off but anywhere in the halls, I couldn’t even breathe, I had to keep my shirt in front of my mouth to breathe through. I made it out just barely alive.
Some of these descriptions are as vile as any I have read in fiction. Some writers excel in heightening the senses of readers and some are able to use language that simulates the actual sensory processes. An amazing book named Perfume is especially that way with smells, aromas, odors, stenches, etc.
Can you name another author or book that trots out more descriptives of smells?
I always responded viscerally to H.P. Lovecraft’s prose and quite a bit of it addressed the sense of smell. Poe had a knack, too.
Maybe a poem that has vile stinks among its sense appeals?
In any event, I admire some of the descriptions here.
You might want to try The Emperor of Scent, which is a nonfiction book about a scientist with a discerning nose who comes up with a new theory behind how people (and animals) identify scents. It’s very interesting, and talks a lot about the perfume industry as well.
On topic, I don’t have any stories that are worse than the momentary discomfort of driving by a landfill on the highway. The stories in that thread makes that seem like a stroll through a meadow of wildflowers in comparison.
Decomposing anything is really nasty. I passed a dead skunk on the road once that was so rank that my car stank for several minutes after I had left its body behind. I passed it at 45-50 miles an hour with my windows rolled up and the vents closed, and it was still cool since it was mid-spring. I can’t imagine how bad it would be to walk through that area, or how much worse it would have been had it been summer time. That’s probably the worst one, and I didn’t even get the full brunt of it.
Probably second to that was the time I had to bury my aunt’s dog, who had partially hidden himself so that it was a few days before they found him. He was half in, half out of the sun under a downed tree. He was a big darn dog, about half my weight at the time, and I had to load him into a wheelbarrow to bring him to where my aunt wanted him buried. Putrid gag-inducing stench, let me tell you. Heck, he stunk before he was dead since he was an outdoor country dog.
Among dog stinks, a cocker spaniel that came in to my family’s dog-grooming shop was memorable. He was owned by people who should never be allowed to have a living thing dependent upon them for care. He’d last been groomed about 2 years before, and was so matted and filthy that we had to just shave him to the skin. Even then, the clipper kept getting clogged up with gunk, so we had to constantly dip the blade in a cleaning solution to keep it running. When we got some of his hair off, we found what had been causing the rank smell.
Besides being incredibly filthy, and infested with fleas to the point where he was peppered all over with flea crap, he had infected wounds from foxtails which had burrowed into his skin. He had been neglected for so long that these ulcers were infested with maggots; he actually had maggots crawling in and out of the wounds. The maggots were probably the main reason he hadn’t died of infection. We immediately informed the owner and made an appointment with the vet next door. We found out from the vet that the dog was pretty lucky. Most of the wounds were not so deep that the foxtails had worked their way into organs.
In comparison to other stinks, my visit to a sewage treatment plant when I was about 13 or so was pretty mild, though it’s obviously memorable. I’m glad my dad didn’t have to work there for long. Yep, my father worked shitty jobs to support us. Literally.
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Decomposing flesh
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Patchouli
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Cat piss
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The town of Greeley, in the summer, when the wind is blowing south.
When I worked at a state park campground, we would have to go into the showers with a shop vac and suck out the hair clogs and whatnot in the drains. I swear you could see and feel the odor come out of the drain and hit you in the face. :eek:
Bong water has to be one of the foulest substances ever. If you spill the stuff, it stinks up whatever it touched for about 3 months.
Oh boy, you guys have me beat. I’ve encountered the unplugged refrigerator – in my parent’s garage. Apparently, they forgot the fish was in the freezer. I think a HazMat team will have to clean that out.
Another is what I’ve been dealing with for about a week now. SOMETHING has died in my garage. It is bad – really bad – and I can’t find the corpse. I suspect a possum has died in the walls (I have drywall over the studs in the garage) and is decomposing. Armed with mask saturated with euclyptus (hey, I saw Silence of the Lambs), I went looking for it. Cannot find the body. In the meantime, the stench is detectable from the driveway.
I couldn’t stand it anymore so went to the dollar store and bought solid air freshners, popped them open and left them strategically throughout the garage. Now I have a vanilla/pine/floral scented garage with a secondary note of decomposition.
My neighbors must think I’m a serial killer. I’m thinking of moving. GAH!
Any rotting meat is quite foul, like chicken fat sitting in a garbage bag outside for 2 consecutive 100 degree days. Whew!
My Dad says that the worst smell he ever smelled was a rendering plant. He says it was worse than the time we let a pile of grass clippings sit out for a few weeks.
Now, some of you may think that grass can’t get that stinky. You’d be sorely mistaken. We had a pile of grass sitting out in the sun for about three weeks one really hot summer. The pile was about four feet in diameter and maybe two and a half feet high. When it came time to dispose of it (which should have been done three weeks earlier), we started to dig into it and noticed a lot of heat coming off of the grass under the top layer. When we got to the bottom, there was a hot goo the consistency and color of black mayonaise. It was an evil, blinding stench. The heat, pressure, and moisture made a sort of satan’s compost.
A case of Fancy Feast cans that had been crushed open in transit. These particular Fancy Feast cans contained shrimp and came from Thailand. They apparently had burst early in their lives, then spent weeks in transit, first aboard a container ship, then a series of warehouses and semi trailers, until they landed in my store. In Florida. In August.
I have never smelled anything as bad as weeks-old rotting shrimp-based cat food, and I hope never to again.