On one hot July day, some steaks fell out of my grocery bag and slid under the seat. They fermented there for a couple weeks before I realized what and where the odor was coming from. Jeezus, but that was nasty!
Oh, that reminds me of another nasty one. When I was a kid, a bottle of milk fell over and spilled inside my parents’ car on the way back from a shopping trip. Despite the carpets being removed and shampooed, and the floor of the car scrubbed out, whenever the temperature got above about 70 a horrible rancid milk smell filled the car for years after, until they got rid of it for scrap.
Made long summer journeys so much fun…
I don’t know. I think it might have been time for a new pillow.
No one smell sticks out, but the most annoying one was when the field across the street fertilized a few years ago with some sort of liquid fertilizer that comes in a tank truck. The whole town stunk and with no warning I hadn’t had a chance to close my windows.
I sort of feel dumb for posting this here because it’s no where near as gross as what the rest of you have endured, but here’s my tale:
About a year ago at the museum where I work, the curator came back from one of our storage areas with a box he had discovered.* He had me do the honors of opening it and recording/cleaning its contents.
It turned out to contain two medical bags from the Civil War and some bones-- two skulls** and an extra lower mandible, to be exact. From the few encounters I’ve had with them, old bones have a strange, faint cinnamony smell. I don’t know if it comes from the packaging in which they’re been stored, or if it’s just the way old bones smell, but it turns my stomach every time. I had to clean the skull with a low-powered vaccuum and a paint brush to get off the dust. I know that the good doctor probably cleaned the skulls well before he used them (for decoration? phrenology?) but I couldn’t help wondering if I was inhaling little bits of dried brain and bone in the dust that my brush raised. I was inhaling parts of a person.
The medical bags had a different, but equally unpleasant smell. The vials still contained medicines, and the lining had stained where some had leaked, along with stains of a probably more sinister origin. The only way I can describe it is to say that it smelled like rotted leather, spoiled vegetation and medicine. I couldn’t help but think I also smelled rotting flesh, but I’m positive that was just my imagination. (Surely it couldn’t linger that long?)
The smell combined with the grime on the instruments themselves made me have to leave the office several times. If it hadn’t been for the odor of the cleaning chemicals somewhat masking it, I don’t think I could have done it. Those blades were filthy.
I hoped and prayed that the instruments had just gotten so dirty in over a hundred years of storage, and I was actually making up scenarios in my head to explain it (“Maybe he let his grandkids play with it after he retired and they got grime on them”) but I couldn’t shake the sickening notion that these were what was used on those poor, suffering soldiers, complete with bits of flesh, bone and blood from the last poor bastard this quack*** butchered, to be tossed back into the case uncleaned for the next time.
So, that was the worst thing I ever smelled, or at least the smell that affected me the most.
- In the early years of the museum’s operation, hardly any records were kept. We’re constantly discovering new artifacts we didn’t know we had in the museum buildings’ cavernous attics and basements. It’s like a treaure hunt, though sometimes the findings can be a mite unpleasant.
** One was labled that it had belonged to a man who was hanged for murder in our town. The top had been sawed off.
*** And, yes, a quack he was. I discovered his log book in the archive stacks. From readining it, I think even his contemporaries would have called him a quack.
I know. I really just came in here to gloat. 
When I was a kid, a friend and I were at her house and bored. So we decided to make something by mixing a huge amount of foodstuffs. It was mostly a combination of condiments and spices and hot sauces and I don’t even know what it was, but the more we added, the worse the smell became. After about a half hour of this, we were becoming physically ill from the fumes.
We washed out the bowl in the toilet or something. Then we washed it again. And again. We ran it through the dishwasher too. And we couldn’t get the smell out of it. So we secretly threw the bowl away, outside, so her mom wouldn’t find out.
But I don’t think anything compares to the smell of anything dead and rotting, especially when wet or out in the sun or after being kept in an unventilated space for any duration.
Gosh, you guys have smelled a bunch of dead stuff. Me, I got a faceful of liquid deer repellant blown back at me by a sudden breeze yesterday, and it was pretty rank (for something not dead or putrefying-while-still-attached, I mean).
I note the ad at the bottom of this page:
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I worked for the University of Minnesota facilities department - in IT - for about six months - over the summer. One day I had to go fix computers at the recycling plant.
The rotting waste of college garbage cans. Gross.
Another one: My ex husband moved out in October. In July of the next year I discovered he’d left a cooler full of food in the garage from the previous September. That may have been the final good riddence moment of a year filled with “I’m glad he is no longer in my life.”
Last August there was a dead armadillo right outside my work. Usually this is not a huge deal because by the time it starts to smell whoever it is that gets paid (not enough) to remove carrion from the roads has come by and done their job. Well, being as this is Texas and it was 101 degrees for 3 days while it had laid there I was sure it would start to smell horrible soon, and I was proven right when 2 of my friends and I were going to lunch and someone had run over it, exploding its rotting innards all over the road. That was, without a doubt, the worst thing I have ever smelled. Ever.
I think I might have told this story before, but when my (now adult) son was about 2 years old, he stuck a wad of tissue up inside his nostril.
A few days later, this strange odour started to permeate the house…and of course, we couldn’t find where it was coming from.
A few days after that, we finally discovered that the filthy stink was coming from HIM…but his nappies were ok (no UTI or weird poos or anything) so I was at a loss as to what the hell was going on.
So I took him to the doc…held the kid out at arms length while the GP gagged and rushed to get HIMSELF a kidney bowl, and after further examination found this little ball of tissue that was well and truly putrefying up his nose.
Bad smell. Not as bad as some here, but I had to LIVE with it for a while.
Don’t worry, Lissa. The people one inhales don’t mind, and it doesn’t do you a, er, particle of harm. May be gross, but honest, swear on my blood-spotted wrists, it’s all right.
I spent a month in Indonesia when I was a kid. One day we were out looking around and wandered into the local, open air, food market. Everything was fine until we reached the area where they were selling meat.
It was a large metal shed crammed with the carcases of just about every animal found in the area. Not only was it the display are but also the preparation area.
Confined space, raw meat, guts, on the equator, 38C and high humidity. :eek:
Dammit, kambuckta I remember reading about this incident in a magazine of medical oddities my ex-husband the doctor subscribed to. It is a small world.
In the mid-seventies, I worked at a venom laboratory, extracting venom from snakes, toads and spiders. This was a part-time company, both owners had full-time jobs. We did our extracting and animal care tasks one or two times a week. The building was heated to around 80 degrees at all times, with under-cage heat strips to maintain even higher temperatures for tropical animals. Some of the snakes ate rodents voluntarily; others were force-fed a semi-liquid porridge using a caulking gun. The sea snakes were fed whole fish. Some of the snakes regurgitated what they were fed. We maintained a supply of thousands of live rats and mice. We usually had several thousand snakes on hand.
Entering the building after an absence of a week was a stunning olfactory experience. Dead rodents, dead snakes, regurgitated food, rodent and snake excrement, all heated and tightly enclosed.
Wouldn’t you know it? No sooner do I mention it than a similar guy comes in yesterday. At least this time the fetid purulence was confined by the guy’s tennis shoe and sock.
But you have to take those off for a foot x-ray.
I have extremely good control over my gag reflex–better than anyone else I know, but I damn near lost it. I was trying so hard not to heave that my eyes were weeping.
Why in hell would anyone wait until they can remove their skin with a spoon before seeing the goddamn doctor?!
Two stories.
My mother, ever the “Waste not, want not” sort (which is all well and good until), decided to make some chicken broth from a cooked chicken we’d pretty much taken care of.
Except, apparently, it’d been a day or two more than recommended. I came home to this thing stewing and smelled something a bit off. After five or 10 minutes, I went into the kitchen, where I was greeted by a stronger version of the scent.
I approached the stove with normal speed and managed to catch sight of the offending bird. “Self,” I said to myself, “this is just a chicken cooking.”
“Punha,” my self responded in turn, “this ain’t no 'just a chicken cooking. And if we don’t get out of here now, it ain’t just gonna be a chicken in there.” I hightailed it out of there and barely managed not to redecorate the lawn.
I spent the next half hour going between the yard and the living room, unable to handle getting any closer to that foul thing. More fun, it was cold, so I had the stench of the thing on my coat, which ended up smelling too foul to wear for much of that time. So I got to choose between feeling nauseated and feeling five minutes away from hypothermia.
About five years ago, I worked for the town doing various things. One of my occasional duties was trash pickup.
One of the residences on the route had some interesting ideas about this whole thing*. He ran a catering business out of his house, and things came to pass such that there was a closed plastic Rubbermaid box about two feet by two feet by four feet (it looks bigger in my mind’s eye, but I doubt it’s the eight feet I’m imagining) basically full of uncooked chicken breasts left to fester in their own juices.
This was in the summer. They’d been out at least long enough to get warm.
Oh, and I know what was inside them because the containers themselves were not being discarded. The innards were. So after pouring/splashing several gallons of rotting meat and associated fluid into the trash vehicle, we then got to replace the things. We had gloves, and they were not covered in plastic.
And there was a container of beef, too.
I have a pretty strong stomach (I’ve never vomited because of a bad smell), but that sure tested things.
*Since this was his business’ garbage, technically we were picking up commercial trash, which wasn’t part of our job description. The guy I was with at the time had some issues with this. The fact that this guy routinely had 150 lbs. of trash didn’t help.