Still, meekly now, I wanted to add that a close second might be the time, while I was working in a pathology department, when I opened a white, opaque plastic cannister (like what ice cream used to come in) that was supposed to contain formalin and an excised body organ. Well, since the formalin had long since spilled out, I had no idea what the organ was. No matter - breast, kidney, brain, liver, whatever - the smell from the viscid “mushroom soup” I encountered was, and remains, beyond description and beyond comparison. Not to gag was impossible. The odor touched centers in me that I didn’t even know existed. Simply beyond words.
I used to be a solid waste inspector. In Alabama. In summer.
Let me tell you, the worst possible smell is Leachate. The black, thick, nasty liquid that percolates through garbage, dead animals, etc and oozes out of the bottom of the landfill. Combine that with 100°+ heat and you know you’ll be burning your shoes when you get home.
I work about a quarter mile from the county’s sewage treatment plant. I try to stay inside whenever the wind is out of the south.
My SO’s farts tend to smell like she has a dead skunk up her butt. One night she actually had me looking around to see where a skunk had died!
Worst of all was a homless person who probably would’ve made Raymond gag. I was working in a grocery store at the time; I went in the store one late summer afternoon and my eyes immediately started watering. I asked around and one of the cashiers mentions a homeless woman in the back, apparently she came in to cool off in the frozen foods section, stinking up the whole store in the process! I fortunately had an outside job so that’s where I went, only to be followed a few minutes later by the homeless woman, who proceeded to relax on a bench. At least her stench wasn’t so bad in the open air.
A particularly gruesome piece of rotting roadkill on a hot, humid summer day. My friend and I were walking down to the drug store down the street to get snacks. All of a sudden, we were hit by this unbelievably vile stench. It’s absolutely indescribable. Then we see this…thing on the side of the road, a smashed mess of blood, guts and fir. Perhaps at one point it was a raccoon. Now, however, it’s Satan’s air freshener. Did I mention how hot and sticky it was that day? You could almost SEE the stink lines rising from that thing.
Oh, no you don’t. You don’t get to regale us with one story and sit back smugly. This was a secondhand smell story…you didn’t actually smell the dead Texan. What’s the worst one you’ve smelled?
Then tell us about the second worst.
And the third worst…
And the time your boss fainted from the stench…
And when you drove your mom gagging from the room just because she heard you tell the story about the bad smell…
This is my cat, Maggie. She’s not quite as bad as when she was a kitten, and tended to be clumsy and step in her own poop, but…ugh. Recently one of her favorite varieties of food was giving her horrible gas and diarrhea. Did I mention this cat sleeps in my room?
The odor of fermenting byproducts of the Pennick and Ford Corn Products Refinery at the south edge of Cedar Rapids, IA in the late 1940’s and of those at the Guimara Winery in Edison, CA in the early 1950’s. Both had the same, overpowering smell that made you never want to use corn syrup or wine again.
Good gravy, there are some horrifying examplews in this thread. But, since we’re talking about stinkiest odors we’ve personally encountered, I may as well add two of mine, which haven’t been mentioned yet in this thread.
The computer lab in my old building had those metal tables with hollow metal tubes as legs, with black plastic caps topping off the end of the metal bars. This one table was about ten years old, and one day out of boredom…or something, I decided to remove one of the plastic caps and smell the air inside. Next thing I knew I was on the floor.
I went with a friend down to Uvalde Texas. His uncle had died, and we went down to clean up the property, move the stuff out, then drive his car back. The uncle hadn’t driven in quite some time, and his car had been in the same spot in the South Texas heat for years, windows rolled up, grass growing around it in the driveway. We knew we had to jump it, so my friend pulled his car over and I got into the other car to pop the hood.
When I opened the door I almost passed out. Aside from a dead mouse or two and some rotting chicken bones from a KFC container tossed in the back, there was an empty bottle of Odwalla-type juice that had been tossed half-empty in the back seat and had fermented to the point that it was growing something out of the bottle. The combination of smells was so bad that we decided to donate the car and have it towed.
The smell of rapeseed (now called canola) being processed will clear an area for square miles! It’s not in a league with putrefying flesh or the goo at the bottom of the garbage dump, but it’s incredibly vile, and the smell hangs over the area of the plant and spreads out. The closer you get, the worse it is.
My eldest child vomited in the car after drinking milk while we were on a long ride aaaaaalll the way across the city in rush hour traffic. It took about an hour and a half to get where we were going, and when we got there we had to do a rush cleanup and get inside to our destination.
My car baked in the August Texas sun for a few hours, and the stench that came out and punched me in the eye when I opened up the car was one of the foulest things I’ve ever smelled.
Yeah, I know all about the blazing Texas sun, but day-um, dead Texan in a box for two months in the blazing Texas heat…please allow me this:
Is there something about Texans that makes their two-months-dead-in-a-metal-box remains smell worse than say a two-months-dead-in-a-metal-box-Arizonan (Arizonite?) or a two-months-dead-in-a-metal-box-Floridian or two-months-dead-in-a-metal-box-Saudi Arabian?
I remembered another bad smell. I used to commute between two cities and in between was a Tropicana orange juice factory. The stench was horrible around there. How could an orange juice factory smell bad, you ask? Oranges smell wonderful, you say. I have no idea how or why it stunk so bad, but it did.
The only way I can think to describe it is to say imagine an Orange. Imagine that the Orange is actually a flesh and blood creature with a bit of an orangey smell. Now imagine that this flesh and blood Orange creature was a giant collosus that rivalled the largest dinosaurs in size and had really bad voniting and diarrhea, body odor, halitosis, has been dead for a few weeks in the hot sun … and then was set on fire. And you might begin to come close to how bad that place smelled.
I was asked to collect urine from a very elderly woman hospitalized for a hip fracture. What I got from her was pea-soup in color and consistancy and I can still smell it, the odor wafting back over these many years…
Mind you, I’ve had every bodily fluid (and some solids) known to nursing spewn on my person over the years but that UTI still haunts me.
While doing some cleanup in a community garden, my service crew had to empty a trashcan. This trashcan had been filled with grass clippings and pulled weeds, other yard waste, etc. It had been left in the garden for I don’t know how long, and had filled up with rainwater. We didn’t know what was in it, because it had a lid (although it was not tightly closed), but when we tried to move it, it fell over because we hadn’t expected it to be so heavy. No one got splashed with the flood of thick, greenish-black water that burst forth, which was a blessing, but it was awful. It was definitely a plant-based smell, but it had such an awful, organic decaying tone. The gallons of liquid (a sort of tea, if you will–it was water with plant material soaking in it that had been sitting out in the hot sun) soaked into the ground and there was nothing we could do.
Another smell that wasn’t terribly awful, just pervasive: over Thanksgiving break, some students prepared dinner in our dorm’s kitchen. They cleaned everything up, but then some other students came in and ate all the leftovers and threw the scraps into the trashcan, and piled the dirty dishes in the sink and left them there. When I got back after three days or so, the smell of rotting poultry and vegetables had permeated the entire floor. It was in the lounge, it was in the hallway, it was in my room. We opened all the windows, but it really didn’t go away until Monday, when the cleaning crew returned and doused the entire kitchen with lemon-fresh whatever. I’m not a huge fan of strongly scented cleaning products, but it was a hundred times better than rotting turkey.
Wait, they explode?
:eek: :eek: :eek:
Reading this thread makes me think of the Victorians and how the two main theories of sickness were the germ theory (which we now know to be the correct one), and the miasma theory, that one got sick from bad smells. I can certainly see where they might have gotten THAT idea.
Oh, one I just remembered-my cat Noel used to have a habit of insisting on being served her food on the stove. We’d sit it between the burners and she’d gobble it up. Noel always eats super fast, and sometimes she eats so fast she pukes it back up. Well, she did this one time on the stove, and some of it must have gotten down under the range. For a week, everytime we used the stove the entire downstairs smelled like burnt cat food.
I’d love to ask my father what kind of olfactory delights he’s sampled as a mortician, but having asked him a lot of rather gross funeral related questions that came up around the SDMB, he’s starting to get really annoyed by them.
Decomposition leads to gas formation. Gases build up in the body which is now essentially a skin balloon. The gas has to escape somehow and it usually isn’t pretty.
Oh my gosh, I’m speechless. Just … ew. Ew. That’s going to haunt me now too, thanks!
My own recent worst smell encounter came from my cat.
He was messing around in the litter box, and came out and positioned himself to do that scooting thing. Sure enough, he had a little poo stuck to his fur on his backside.
Gross, but it happens. I grabbed a paper towel, scooped up the cat and held him rear-side-up.
It all happened so fast, but yet, like in slow motion …
I grabbed the poo, and as I pulled it away, I realized it was attached to something still in the cat’s butt. There was a little resistance, and then … something … popped out of the butt. The cat said “Meeeooeer?” I gagged.
It was a hair ball, all matted up and about the size of a gumball. It was held together with yellow, liquidy cat poo. I think it had maybe been stuck there for some time.
To make matters worse, it wasn’t the cat’s hair … it was MY HAIR. The cat ate my hair and made a poo-ball with it! The smell was rank. It was like rotting poo smell, with something that might be rotting hair. I didn’t realize that hair could rot, but there was definitely a gross hair smell going on. It also had a note of mold. I think it had visible stink lines.
While not as bad as decomposing bodies, it had some shock value because:
I was not expecting it at all.
It was pretty close to my face, considering, and I was holding it in my hand (with a paper towel, but still, I don’t think Bounty meets HazMat standards).
Did I mention it was a poo ball made out of MY OWN HAIR?
Ugh. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I used to hate passing it en route to Orlando. When we neared Lakeland, it was always WINDOWS UP NOW!!! until we passed it. I was so happy when it disappeared.
Butyric acid, skatol (well, a methyl indole derivative much like it), and cadaverine are all pretty goddamn nasty. Bored grad students will sniff anything. Some mercaptans like 2-mercaptoethanol and dithiothreatol have potent odors, but I’ve gotten used to those because I’m exposed to them fairly frequently, as they’re common reducing agents. I almost like the smell of 2-mercaptoethanol now, which is bizarre.
Besides the stanky funk of the lab, I did encounter one all natural gag-inducer I never imagined: As a favor, I took my parents’ dog to the veterinarian for them, and during what was supposed to be a routine checkup, the vet announced the dog would “have to have her anal glands expressed”. She squeezed this off-white spoo out of her back-end, and I thought I was going to retch. It was unbelievably foul, some rotten puss substance mixed with canine ass-musk. Horrid.
Reading this made me gag more than once. In his mouth. Horrifying.
I’ve been down that road before. As a premed I’ve had the opportunity to observe at a few autopsies, two of which involved running the bowel. I was amazed just by the smell that came from these patients’ abdominal cavities once they were opened up. It was almost, but not entirely unlike rotting pumpkins. We surely do stink on the inside, but add that to all the various stages of shit you find from the stomach to the colon and it’s positively unreal. I’d like to think that I got more preparation for 3rd year rotations than just an anatomy lesson from that, but who knows what olfactory abominations await me.
Still, this came several years after the worst stench I’ve been exposed to. My freshman year the initiation rituals for my roommate’s frat during hell week involved taking all the pledges to the basement of the house (all dressed in their humiliating costumes - assless chaps, diapers, drag, etc.), and pelting them with all manner of what he later told me was basically condiments like barbecue sauce, mayonaise, chocolate syrup, etc. They were then forced to wear those costumes and not bathe for the rest of the week.
When it was over he came back with several of his friends. They’d already cleaned themselves up, but they left their violated clothes in the hallway. Try not to imagine it: the reek of week-old BO from three jocks lovingly and thoroughly mingled with god knows what the senior members slathered them with.
Hell week was in January. Our hallway still had an unnatural aroma to it when we moved out in may.
And with that chance to reflect on my freshman year, I also remember one morning waking up to the smell of putrefying drunk vomit permeating our suite. It was the worst thing I’d ever smelled until the hell week incident; it’s still a good story even if its offensiveness got dethroned only a couple months later.
Another one of my roommates had gotten wasted beyond belief and puked a trail from our common room leading to a cardboard box containing some of his books and shoes that he had tainted down through several different planes of existence. The box was a write-off, but had to throw out our area rug too. The parents of my third and final roommate decided to drop in for a visit that day, too. I remember his humiliation as we worked to clean up after the other guy* while his younger sister looked on in horror from the couch.
*The real hell of it was that the one who did it was trying to suggest in front of everybody that it had been MY fault when there was a trail leading to his room and he didn’t remember most of the night anyway. God but that fucker pissed me off.
