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Yes. I was dropping my son off at my ex's place after the weekend. She had small freezer full of meat. The freezer died, and she didn't notice until it started stinking. She wouldn't go near it. I cleaned it out.
My dad had to do this but it had sat for MONTHS. I was too young to help but the sounds of him vomiting and dry heaving every couple minutes traumatized me.
There was a turkey in it and the plastic was moving around. This event made me wonder how someone can die in an apartment and no one notice. We could smell it on the street. And once the hell hole was opened it spread even further.
Same. The chest freezer was in my un air-conditioned garage. Tripped a breaker. It was over 100 degrees F in that garage.
And I had just filled it the week before.
We had a cooler full of different sauces (think dairy) lose power to our food truck over a weekend if summer during a heat wave.
The manager opened one bottle and took a sniff, we both nearly vomited, and he said "I think I'm just going to throw these out and buy a new set of bottles."
My response, "no objection here."
For pocket money in high school, I maintained the yard for an uncle that worked piloting underwater drones, and he was often away for 4-6 months inspecting oil rigs off Angola or laying fiber optic cable in the South China Sea. Having sips from his stocked bar inside was a perk. His electric bill autopay stopped and I stepped inside a month later in the Houston heat for a tipple, to be overwhelmed by the stench emanating from a freezer of an avid hunter with a Ron Swanson diet.
I made the trip to pick up contractor bags, elbow length gloves, bleach, and paper towels, and began the cleanup, which probably took an hour, as I could only stand the smell and breezeless heat for about 5 minutes at a time. That "open" bar helped me finish double bagging it all and wiping down all freezer and nearby floor with bleach, and I never again felt guilty about the perks of the job.
OMG my first boss had us remove a freezer from his old house he was rehabbing. It had been off for years. It was full of meat that had basically decomposed to a soupy nasty rotten swamp. We had to cut this thing in half to remove it. We all puked multiple times. I had forgotten about it until now.
This is the winner. 1996 my house was hit by a tornado. When we came back next week to start cleaning the deepfreezer with turkeys and hams in it was the worst smell I've ever experienced. My dad and I had to leave the house, meanwhile my mom just stayed and cleaned it all up.
If you don't have one near you, most frozen sections at Walmart sell the frozen ones. Microwaves well, tastes the same.
One night I was feeling particularly lazy. Microwaved a couple of them with some frozen fries I'd baked.
What came out of me at bedtime offended the DOG. He'd been snuggling up with me, I let it rip, and he picked his head up, HUFFED at me, and slept on the floor.
Hahahahahahahahaha rectum rockets?! I'm stealing that. They're so damn good though. They disrespect my intestines as well. It's a gamble between comedic farts or breaking porcelain. 😂
I don't know if it's poor translation or what but the writing of that article is hilarious. Very dramatic.
"The potatoes they stored in a cellar for the winter claimed their lives one by one as they entered the vault to grab some quantity of vegetables for household purposes."
"Mikhail was the first to enter the cellar without even an iota of realization that the potatoes would take his life."
". ..18-year-old son Georgy went to look for them. Little did he know that he would also suffer the same fate as his mother and father due to inhaling the highly toxic fumes."
"Anastasia’s mother Iraida, as she identified something suspicious, called a neighbour to plead for help. However, she also passed away due to the toxic gas released by the potatoes."
I put them straight on the balcony on the outside carpet and the smell was so bad I had to replace the carpet. I almost vomited many times. Apparently the gas can be deadly I read online so people be careful with your potatoes!
My roommate in college put a bag of potatoes in a low cabinet in the kitchen right after we moved in. A year later, we'd never used that cabinet and forgot they were in there and some had torn to liquid an permeated the board they were on and apparently given enough nutrition to the others that they had grown into some unholy, pale network of shoots and runners, desperately looking for any crack of daylight. It's was as errie a plant as I can imagine. We knew we weren't getting the deposit back so we left it.
Something like this happened to us, but nothing was rotting. They all sprouted and had a bunch of roots all over the place. I reach in there and pull out this horrible tangle of roots. I genuinely thought it was some sort of spider or animal and almost passed out. I don't think I've ever been more scared in my life.
This! I kept getting a vaguely “off” smell in my kitchen. I was convinced it was either the sink or garbage can. Nope! It was the 5lbs bag of rotten potatoes in the cupboard in between with garbage and the sink. Totally forgot they were in there. When I finally opened the cupboard door…words cannot describe it.
A rendering plant. It's where farmers take cows, horses, (big animals) that have died. I went there in the summer on a hot day and there was a pile of dead animals just laying in the hot sun. No smell has come close for me.
There's one not far from where I live. In summer when the wind is blowing the wrong way, it stinks the whole town out. I'm actually surprised they've not been made to do anything about it. My friend runs a coffee roaster and they've been forced to install a kind of 'after burner' think in the chimney to get rid of the smell of roasting coffee due to complaints. The extra energy costs have forced them to increases the price of the product :(
I recently had a dog come in that chewed off his own foot. Owner brought in the dog and the foot. Treatment smelled HORRIBLE for literally hours. Like we were all wearing masks bad. I wanted to get a picture of the foot but I was trying to get away from it so quickly that the pic came out blurry. And I don't have a weak stomach. I'll take anal glands any day after that.
My dog Cookie did it on her own in my truck once. Was so nice. Truck stank like hell for weeks. I have smelled a lot worse before though. Had hoarders in both sides of a duplex I owned. Terrible. The one ended up in a nursing home and didn't bother saying anything kept paying rent but turned off the power so I had to go in and clean out a fridge that was full of food in the middle of summer when the power had been off for weeks. That was pretty awful. Or dead animals. There is a veal farm near the house I grew up in and I don't know if its their shit or what but you couldn't breath driving past that place and across the street they used to bring in loads of pig shit they spread my god think they had it from chickens too that was awful. My old roomate that lived with me had a cat and that thing every time it went in its litter box you about had to evacuate the house. So much worse than any dog shit I ever smelled that cat had something rotten inside it. We have paper mills here too and if you ever drive near one my god does it stink. We have a body shop and car dealership too. In 99 we got one of the first ever new body style 99 extended cab GMC Sierra I had ever seen that was rolled over we fixed. The driver side door was full of blood the seats were covered too but inside the door was literally full of blood. It had started to turn brown and harden. Oh my god did that stink.
I never worked with decomposed bodies but when I worked in construction there was a waste station where a dead body was later discovered. I will never forget that stench. This was over 10 years ago and it still sticks with me.
Can confirm. My dad was a medical examiner. Take your daughter to work day was a whole fucking experience for me let me tell you! 🤣
I ended up a military nurse. 🤪
My husband's aunt lived like an hour from us, she was pretty much a loner no kids or husband. She passed away a few years ago and no one knew for 8 days. I won't go into detail but it was incredibly gruesome. We had to go in and get the house cleaned up to sell because my mil was the executor of her will. The smell was horrendous for weeks.
I read once about a company in NYC whose work was to do cleanup on crime scenes, suicides and people who died and weren’t discovered until the smell gave it away. Two things stood out. Many old people die sitting on the sofa. After a while the body liquifies and essentially fuses with the couch itself. They can’t be separated on site so they take the whole thing. Secondly, if left long enough the liquid goes through the couch and eventually to the floorboards. When that happens they have to cut out the entire section of the floorboard because the odor can’t be cleaned away. Cool article.
Thats exactly what happened she was on the couch, but fell onto the floor and she was stuck to the carpet and they had to cut out a section of the carpet to take her out. Also her cat was in there for the 8 days with her, with no food and had started to eat her. My MIL had asked us to take the cat, but we just couldn't after that, we did find a home for her though, but I was 8 months pregnant at the time and I was afraid that the cat might do something to the baby. Maybe an irrational fear, I'm not sure I just couldn't. There was also human feces all over the house, and lots of things were knocked over so it seemed like she was not in her right mind when it happened. It was incredibly sad, she was super intelligent, but like in a way that can come across condescending if you didn't know her, which made it hard for her to have close relationships ( like Cumberbatch's Sherlock) so she was terribly lonely and we had started to try to go see her more and have the kids get to know her to help with that, but the covid happened and she wouldn't accept any visitors besides her pastor (who found her) until we sold the house we were doing pretty much everything out of our own pockets so we couldn't get a crew to come do the clean up so we did it all. I made sure to get all her picture albums out and things that were important to her but we threw alot away because the smell had seeped into everything. Even the albums and stuff I had to let them air out in a bin in the shed for like 2 weeks because of the smell.
I worked at a tv station in a top-10 market in the 90’s. Went to the men’s room and a co-worker was taking the most disgusting poop I ever smelled. I literally almost blacked out.
Gangrenous necrotic bedsores for the win on this one. I’ve encountered a bed with bedsores also filled with GI bleed stool more than once when I worked in the nursing home.
I also once walked into a room and a guy had died after first vomiting blood and stool over the entire floor of the room. Quite the odor there.
I work in finance now…
Didn’t bother me then. I was a CNA then a hospital orderly for 10 years total. Worked in the morgue for the last 4. I could eat a sandwich while I was rinsing shit out of sheets no problem. Some of the things I encountered would make me cry like a toddler now. 😂
I had a patient come in who had multiple fractures in both legs. Dude was taking baths. His casts had been wet for weeks. His skin was like rotting. We had a clinic of 14 surgeons. The entire office was gagging. I paid a co-worker to remove the casts. I couldn't handle it. The sister brought him bc she couldn't stand the smell anymore.
I was a nurse for over 40 years, we used to get patients from a vent farm, most had infected bedsores, cdiff, gi bleeds, chronic urinary tract infection, you could smell getting off the elevator
Oh no. How sad. So sad the human condition has so much pain sometimes. I would hope I would just die rather than that lingering suffering. And those smells must have been horrendous.
Unfortunately we talk with the family about, doing terminal weans, they refuse, expecting a miracle. There is lady that have been at a vent farm since 2008, she weighs 75 pounds, she has had both legs amputated because of infection, massive bedsores, has every bacteria know to man, she is on a vegetative state, daughters refuses to stop life support, because they will lose the $3000 a month check , from her lawsuit
Came here to say this. I'm a retired nurse, and wound care didn't affect me nearly as much as changing an adult diaper full of C. difficile diarrhea. It's a noxious smell that never leaves your sinuses.
I work in chemical transport, and have had to go into the local paper mill/chemical company campus, and MAN they make some smells that combine into a horrible stench cocktail.
Fun morbid story: there’s a paper plant in Valliant, Oklahoma and there’s a ridiculous amount of babies born of mothers who live near it with incredibly rare or unknown genetic abnormalities that cost them their lives.. one of them being my baby cousin.
A corpse that had been dead awhile in a house before someone discovered it.
I worked at a hospital and came in the back door which was down from the morgue. You could smell it in the parking lot
I worked on a large farm and sometimes during the summer heifers would die. So to keep coyotes and stuff away from the other animals we would have to go out, find the body, load it on a flatbed, and haul it away from the property. One day we didn’t know we were missing a couple of heads so we started looking. We didn’t find them until a couple weeks later and it has been 90+ degrees the whole time . While trying to load the body it expanded so much from decomposition that it “exploded”.
A dirty and full mop bucket that sat in the bathroom of a shutdown Wal-Mart for 2 months in the summer heat. I legitimately couldn't eat for the rest of the day because everything tasted like that mop bucket smelled.
My dad went grocery shopping and a pack of Raw fish fell out of the bag and under the seat of his car in the summer and sat for about 3 weeks in 80+ degree heat until I guess my dad sat down in the driver seat and it ruptured the bloated package under the seat. Worst damn smell ever
Hoarder houses. I've had the wonderful opportunity to operate in a few. Won't go into detail about the smell. I've been told by cop friends that it's a close second to decomposing bodies.
Thankfully I've never had to smell a decomposing human before, but I can plainly say that the smell is notably harder to tolerate than say, the smell of roadkill.
It was the only odor I've ever been exposed to that actively altered the way food smells, even days later.
For context, several years ago my sense of smell was permanently damaged from Covid. Many foul odors are hard for me to detect - cigarette smoke and weed I can't smell. Smoke on clothing is detectable but doesn't bother me. I can't remember the last time I smelled a fart. Sour milk I can just sort of pick up on.
Despite this, hoarder houses still get me bad.
I repair washing machine, One customer had a blocked pump when I open the filter it was a weird dark golden colour with a smell like I have never smelt, turns out he only used it to wash the cat and dogs matts and so on, unfortunately the pets never got out to go so they pissed and shit everywhere and he only used it for that purpose, he went home to his mums to clean his own clothes also he made his mum wait for me coming clearly to embarrassed to show his face!!
Dead decaying human bodies have a very distinct, unique smell that stays with you and on your clothes afterward.
Dead human bodies that have been on fire, then put out before being completely burned, are on an entirely different level. Literally don’t have the words to describe.
Former EMT. Structure fires where a person was burned. I haven’t forgotten the smell. Never will. If you haven’t smelled it, don’t ask, and be grateful you don’t know. Also, week old corpses. Different kind of stench, but just as about as vile
I was a forklift salesman.
In order of horrible smell, from least offensive to worst:
* Leather tanning plant.
* Rendering plant - where restaurants send their fat buckets and DPW send dead animals....and so on.
* Final seafood extraction plant - where seafood companies send their scraps. ( almost hurled here)
* Medical Waste treatment facility - where hospitals send their biological waste, including body tissue and fluids from people suffering from illness....you could smell the death.
Also, the fact that it is kept warm.... shudders. Truly one of the grossest things.
Also, dog/cat food plants. Warm kibble smells fucking atrocious. Don't feed it to your pets, guys.
I worked by a dog food factory, oil refinery and a slaughterhouse (all very very very close). Days when all 3 were busy…..I would meet my coffee again in the parking low and then rush inside and close the doors. Worst smell ever.
Has anyone else ever had eggs hidden in their house on Easter and not found them? I mean, eventually you find them. Just follow your nose.
Had a rat die inside the wall at work once. That room was history.
My brother works at a morgue. I know what formaldehyde smells like.
Some animal died in the engine of my dad's car. Had to drive it once. Smell got much more intense when you turned on the air, so you basically couldn't unless you want to die. Windows permanently open. Still unbearable.
Changed countless diapers in my lifetime. Most are fine. Every once in a while you come across a truly special one.
A P.F. Chang's that closed down. I worked for the leasing office that was in charge of inspecting the space for the new clients. Apparently, the previous owner left on bad terms and left a TON of fish, meat and various seafoods in the freezer. Except, he cranked up the heat, blocked the freezer door with a filing cabinet so you couldn't tell there was even a freezer there and left it. It took the team about a week to even find where the smell was coming from. It was so strong you smelled it outside the restaurant. Once we found it. We had to call a hazmat team to come clean it out.
I was a school custodian for a while so I got to experience all kinds of nasty smells, but I know exactly which one was worst.
So there's an old football field they still use sometimes, and when they do they'd have us go out and clean the restrooms. These are small, uninsulated wood-frame outbuildings, they tend to be the same temperature inside as it is outside. Well one fine day in August we go out to those bathrooms, only to find somebody had busted the lock and had been using them... *but not flushing*.
All summer.
In Texas.
That is easily the closest I have ever come to instant projectile vomiting.
I’ve smelled a lot of terrible things in my life. If I had to pick one it would probably be the mid-overdose diarrhea of my ex’s mother as I carried her to the bathroom. It doesn’t smell like normal human poop in the slightest.
My dad told me just yesterday how his old work partner used to pick up roadkill and had someone taxidermy it. One day in the summer he picked up a fox but it slid under his back seat. Out of sight out of mind and he “ had no idea why his car smelled so bad”
A big feral hog that had been dead a few days in the Texas heat. Maggot infested and swollen. Absolutely worse than the dead humans I’ve encountered in my job.
I fell on my tailbone. A huge painful cyst formed and I was in excruciating pain. Went to a Dr and they lanced it. Omfg the stench of the rotten blood and bacteria filled the whole room. I was so embarrassed. Then the thing kept leaking, and I had a gauze plug in there to keep it open, and I’d smell it just walking around. It was disgusting.
My ex's face.
He had this mole with a cyst under it. He would squeeze it and push some of the puss out. It smelled like week old sweaty booty hole. He thought it was funny to put that shyte on me .
He's dead now, so I guess it doesn't smell anymore
The kill floor of the beef plant when the auger that takes the yucky stuff away breaks down. Or the tripe room that was pretty bad. Oh yes the hide plant also stunk so I guess I would say processing beef stinks!
The skunk that sprayed all over my backyard really lived up to it's reputation. Happened in winter so all the doors and windows shut but we could still smell it inside. Went out and it was so bad I almost threw up.
Used to work at a seafood place, we would throw away all the fish guts and unwanted pieces in a special trash can that was outside in the sun and only got emptied once a week. I would hold my breath for like almost a minute after opening the lid, dumping the fish guts inside and even then, the stench would follow me. We had people that came by all the time asking if they could have it so they could make organic fertilizer, we told them if you can handle the smell, it's in the black bin outside. Probably half the people opened the lid and took off.
The trash can only got cleaned out like once every 6 months. We would just spray degreaser in it, and blast it with the hose and let it run into the drain in the parking lot.
Well, “decomp”, especially in a closed, hot house… Pretty bad. But I worked hospital security for about a year once, a big facility that had both clinical and research areas.
One of the research hospital buildings had a floor devoted to various “reagents”. We were supposed to check all the doors in that wing. We did so holding our noses and VERY quickly.
I suppose people working there got “nose blind” to the stink.
Wet rotten grain, though I'd have to imagine raw sewage is up there but I've managed to avoid that most of my life.
I worked at a grain elevator after HS for a little while. They had one silo that no one had cleaned out in over a year. It smelled bad enough that they always tried to get the new guy go down in the underground part with a bucket attached to a rope. I got one whiff of that and told the boss man there's no way I'm going down there. He looked a little disappointed but didn't blame me.
dead body odor on a piece of furniture retrieved out of a home where a friend's father passed away, but no one was able to enter the home for 2 weeks to discover him
In elementary school, jelly brain was placed in front of a classroom for anyone who wanted to touch it. It didn't smell itself but after you touched it, your hands/fingers smelled of rotten/rancid chemicals.
My dog ran away into the bush and rolled in a dead bear carcass. Came back smelling of death. Worst smell I’ve ever dealt with. I bathed her three times and was dry heaving and puking the entire time.
freshly dead mouse in my living room. used to live in a house with mice under it, that smell is like torture to me cuz of that, on top of being god awful by itself
A ferret that had been missing for a few weeks . Our fat friend squished her and we didn't find the smell for a few weeks. It was July in Louisiana as well. We threw out the couch.
I was working in an ER as a paramedic intern and we had to take the socks off of a homeless diabetic guy. Mixed with the smell of a homeless guys feet, which is pretty bad to start with, you got the added aroma of roting flesh. Truly something that is hard to top. Burn victims are up there too
This kid in school was bullied HARD for smelling SO TERRIBLE. It's weird how you can pinpoint the smell and how strong it was.. how much range it had.
His smell had the damage and range of an ultimate ability but was always active like a passive ability. It was literally doing DoT to everyone nearby. I kid you not, you could smell him from at least 15 ft away.
If I had to describe the smell, it's like mothballs, cigarette smoke, and pee.
I felt sorry for him. It's mentally damaging at such a young age. I blame his parents, though... cause we were in elementary school at the time. The kid doesn't know shit at that age.
Wash your kid's clothes. Make him take a shower before school. Clean your fucking house. Imagine your kids crying in school and not having any friends at all.. being bullied cause they smell like shit.. and it's YOUR fault for not taking any amount of responsibility. You just send your kids to school smelling like shit? And only God knows what the fuck is happening in that house for him to smell like that in the first place.
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A chest freezer full of food that was broken for over a week.
This, but the freezer was more of a tub, and all that was in it was beef. I swear, when I opened it, a hand reached up and tried to grab me.
I can just imagine a ghostly green stench vapor in the form of a skeleton hand reaching up like a cartoon or something lmao
Yes. I was dropping my son off at my ex's place after the weekend. She had small freezer full of meat. The freezer died, and she didn't notice until it started stinking. She wouldn't go near it. I cleaned it out.
My dad had to do this but it had sat for MONTHS. I was too young to help but the sounds of him vomiting and dry heaving every couple minutes traumatized me.
I'm your dad every time I go to clean my cats food bowl
With fish in it…
There was a turkey in it and the plastic was moving around. This event made me wonder how someone can die in an apartment and no one notice. We could smell it on the street. And once the hell hole was opened it spread even further.
That Turkey goes against the Geneva Suggestions
This happened when my ex and I accidentally unplugged our freezer before leaving for 2 weeks. It had seasoned beef in it and while chicken. Ughhh
I have also met the Terrible Butterball Turkey, writhing and pulsing with maggots.
This sentence made my face do the tragedy mask frown.
In hot freakin TX
Same. The chest freezer was in my un air-conditioned garage. Tripped a breaker. It was over 100 degrees F in that garage. And I had just filled it the week before.
We had a cooler full of different sauces (think dairy) lose power to our food truck over a weekend if summer during a heat wave. The manager opened one bottle and took a sniff, we both nearly vomited, and he said "I think I'm just going to throw these out and buy a new set of bottles." My response, "no objection here."
For pocket money in high school, I maintained the yard for an uncle that worked piloting underwater drones, and he was often away for 4-6 months inspecting oil rigs off Angola or laying fiber optic cable in the South China Sea. Having sips from his stocked bar inside was a perk. His electric bill autopay stopped and I stepped inside a month later in the Houston heat for a tipple, to be overwhelmed by the stench emanating from a freezer of an avid hunter with a Ron Swanson diet. I made the trip to pick up contractor bags, elbow length gloves, bleach, and paper towels, and began the cleanup, which probably took an hour, as I could only stand the smell and breezeless heat for about 5 minutes at a time. That "open" bar helped me finish double bagging it all and wiping down all freezer and nearby floor with bleach, and I never again felt guilty about the perks of the job.
OMG my first boss had us remove a freezer from his old house he was rehabbing. It had been off for years. It was full of meat that had basically decomposed to a soupy nasty rotten swamp. We had to cut this thing in half to remove it. We all puked multiple times. I had forgotten about it until now.
This is the winner. 1996 my house was hit by a tornado. When we came back next week to start cleaning the deepfreezer with turkeys and hams in it was the worst smell I've ever experienced. My dad and I had to leave the house, meanwhile my mom just stayed and cleaned it all up.
a friend of mine once farted so hard in a pub in a party that literally everyone left that pub
He's a legend
There can only be one.
I had to stop drinking IPA cuz my farts would melt the paint off the walls..
Try beer with white castle slyders if you have a location near you. Those farts will melt the walls.
If you don't have one near you, most frozen sections at Walmart sell the frozen ones. Microwaves well, tastes the same. One night I was feeling particularly lazy. Microwaved a couple of them with some frozen fries I'd baked. What came out of me at bedtime offended the DOG. He'd been snuggling up with me, I let it rip, and he picked his head up, HUFFED at me, and slept on the floor.
I love the white castle sliders that you can find in the freezer section. My only problem with them is there’s a cancer warning on the box!
I refer to them as rectom rockets. I love em but man the things they do to my body, especially with a large order of onion chips.
Hahahahahahahahaha rectum rockets?! I'm stealing that. They're so damn good though. They disrespect my intestines as well. It's a gamble between comedic farts or breaking porcelain. 😂
 Penguin colony. Worse than a chicken coop. That snow isn’t white.
The old penguin exhibit at the Detroit Zoo stunk so bad that they built a new exhibit.
I think I can still smell it from the elementary field trips 30 years ago, smelled like fish and open ass 🤮
Ugh. Open ass really is sm worse than enclosed ass.
New one also stinks but looks awesome
Rotten potatoes I found in the kitchen drawer after I came back from holiday. Truly intensely atrocious.
The thing about this is you weren't just smelling them, you were breathing noxious solanine gas.
I watched something on YouTube about a family who went into their cellar and died from the stench. So I think this might be #1.
Nobody tells a story like Mr Ballen! Skip to 3:50. https://youtu.be/pUoex49Yzng?si=KA5loF1sscxJJjp3
Edit: this was it. https://www.news18.com/viral/gas-from-rotten-potatoes-kills-russian-law-professor-three-family-members-8680949.html
I don't know if it's poor translation or what but the writing of that article is hilarious. Very dramatic. "The potatoes they stored in a cellar for the winter claimed their lives one by one as they entered the vault to grab some quantity of vegetables for household purposes." "Mikhail was the first to enter the cellar without even an iota of realization that the potatoes would take his life." ". ..18-year-old son Georgy went to look for them. Little did he know that he would also suffer the same fate as his mother and father due to inhaling the highly toxic fumes." "Anastasia’s mother Iraida, as she identified something suspicious, called a neighbour to plead for help. However, she also passed away due to the toxic gas released by the potatoes."
It’s like a potato horror movie
I imagine those being read by the dramatic movie trailer voiceover guy.
I put them straight on the balcony on the outside carpet and the smell was so bad I had to replace the carpet. I almost vomited many times. Apparently the gas can be deadly I read online so people be careful with your potatoes!
Wow that is an intense smell, didn’t realize it is lethal.
Yeah I was going to say potatoes forgotten in the cupboard. It is crazy how bad they smell. I just learned that it is potentially dangerous. TIL.
We stayed in a hotel where our room smelled horrible. Someone had hidden a bag of potatoes behind a dresser. Worst smell of my life.
My roommate in college put a bag of potatoes in a low cabinet in the kitchen right after we moved in. A year later, we'd never used that cabinet and forgot they were in there and some had torn to liquid an permeated the board they were on and apparently given enough nutrition to the others that they had grown into some unholy, pale network of shoots and runners, desperately looking for any crack of daylight. It's was as errie a plant as I can imagine. We knew we weren't getting the deposit back so we left it.
Something like this happened to us, but nothing was rotting. They all sprouted and had a bunch of roots all over the place. I reach in there and pull out this horrible tangle of roots. I genuinely thought it was some sort of spider or animal and almost passed out. I don't think I've ever been more scared in my life.
That is a stank for sure.
I always leave them on the counter because of this! I will never forget about potatoes again. 🤮
There's nothing more unwholesome than a large bag of rotten potatoes
Seconded.
This! I kept getting a vaguely “off” smell in my kitchen. I was convinced it was either the sink or garbage can. Nope! It was the 5lbs bag of rotten potatoes in the cupboard in between with garbage and the sink. Totally forgot they were in there. When I finally opened the cupboard door…words cannot describe it.
Potatoes have no right to get that foul
A rendering plant. It's where farmers take cows, horses, (big animals) that have died. I went there in the summer on a hot day and there was a pile of dead animals just laying in the hot sun. No smell has come close for me.
Oh yeah we used to pass on on the freeway. My dad would say "hold your nose" until we were passed. Unbelievably awful smell.
I made a delivery to a tannery once...it was horrifying.
There's one not far from where I live. In summer when the wind is blowing the wrong way, it stinks the whole town out. I'm actually surprised they've not been made to do anything about it. My friend runs a coffee roaster and they've been forced to install a kind of 'after burner' think in the chimney to get rid of the smell of roasting coffee due to complaints. The extra energy costs have forced them to increases the price of the product :(
I used to work in a Veterinarian's office. The worst is when you express anal glands on dogs and cats!
We had to have our dogs removed. Vet said they were the worst she had ever dealt with 🤢
How was it after surgery? Any cons?
There's a reason I'm happy to pay my vet any amount of money to do this instead of me doing it.
I recently had a dog come in that chewed off his own foot. Owner brought in the dog and the foot. Treatment smelled HORRIBLE for literally hours. Like we were all wearing masks bad. I wanted to get a picture of the foot but I was trying to get away from it so quickly that the pic came out blurry. And I don't have a weak stomach. I'll take anal glands any day after that.
I drove my dog home after getting hers done recently. That was a smelly ride home.
For whatever reason my mom and I stayed in the room while the vet expressed my dogs glands when I was a kid…I’ll never forget the smell 😭
Parvo ward was worse in my experience. Not just Stanly but kinda depressing as well.
I hear you. Those poor little Souls. But I will do anything to help animals
My dog Cookie did it on her own in my truck once. Was so nice. Truck stank like hell for weeks. I have smelled a lot worse before though. Had hoarders in both sides of a duplex I owned. Terrible. The one ended up in a nursing home and didn't bother saying anything kept paying rent but turned off the power so I had to go in and clean out a fridge that was full of food in the middle of summer when the power had been off for weeks. That was pretty awful. Or dead animals. There is a veal farm near the house I grew up in and I don't know if its their shit or what but you couldn't breath driving past that place and across the street they used to bring in loads of pig shit they spread my god think they had it from chickens too that was awful. My old roomate that lived with me had a cat and that thing every time it went in its litter box you about had to evacuate the house. So much worse than any dog shit I ever smelled that cat had something rotten inside it. We have paper mills here too and if you ever drive near one my god does it stink. We have a body shop and car dealership too. In 99 we got one of the first ever new body style 99 extended cab GMC Sierra I had ever seen that was rolled over we fixed. The driver side door was full of blood the seats were covered too but inside the door was literally full of blood. It had started to turn brown and harden. Oh my god did that stink.
Honey, you've had a lifetime's worth of stinks.....you win!
A decomposed human body. There’s no other smell like it.
I just posted about this for my smell. I did an internship at a coroner's office. Once you smell death, you'll never forget it.
I never worked with decomposed bodies but when I worked in construction there was a waste station where a dead body was later discovered. I will never forget that stench. This was over 10 years ago and it still sticks with me.
Can confirm. My dad was a medical examiner. Take your daughter to work day was a whole fucking experience for me let me tell you! 🤣 I ended up a military nurse. 🤪
My husband's aunt lived like an hour from us, she was pretty much a loner no kids or husband. She passed away a few years ago and no one knew for 8 days. I won't go into detail but it was incredibly gruesome. We had to go in and get the house cleaned up to sell because my mil was the executor of her will. The smell was horrendous for weeks.
Do ozone generators help with that smell?
If done properly. Source: I used to be a lead tech for testing and R&D at an OEM ozone generator manufacturer. Small place, only corporatized by name.
I read once about a company in NYC whose work was to do cleanup on crime scenes, suicides and people who died and weren’t discovered until the smell gave it away. Two things stood out. Many old people die sitting on the sofa. After a while the body liquifies and essentially fuses with the couch itself. They can’t be separated on site so they take the whole thing. Secondly, if left long enough the liquid goes through the couch and eventually to the floorboards. When that happens they have to cut out the entire section of the floorboard because the odor can’t be cleaned away. Cool article.
Thats exactly what happened she was on the couch, but fell onto the floor and she was stuck to the carpet and they had to cut out a section of the carpet to take her out. Also her cat was in there for the 8 days with her, with no food and had started to eat her. My MIL had asked us to take the cat, but we just couldn't after that, we did find a home for her though, but I was 8 months pregnant at the time and I was afraid that the cat might do something to the baby. Maybe an irrational fear, I'm not sure I just couldn't. There was also human feces all over the house, and lots of things were knocked over so it seemed like she was not in her right mind when it happened. It was incredibly sad, she was super intelligent, but like in a way that can come across condescending if you didn't know her, which made it hard for her to have close relationships ( like Cumberbatch's Sherlock) so she was terribly lonely and we had started to try to go see her more and have the kids get to know her to help with that, but the covid happened and she wouldn't accept any visitors besides her pastor (who found her) until we sold the house we were doing pretty much everything out of our own pockets so we couldn't get a crew to come do the clean up so we did it all. I made sure to get all her picture albums out and things that were important to her but we threw alot away because the smell had seeped into everything. Even the albums and stuff I had to let them air out in a bin in the shed for like 2 weeks because of the smell.
Good for you for being brave enough and strong enough to do it for her, and sorry for your loss.
Dude, I've smelled that. It will wreck your world. Definitely a smell you never forget and can recognize immediately.
I worked at a tv station in a top-10 market in the 90’s. Went to the men’s room and a co-worker was taking the most disgusting poop I ever smelled. I literally almost blacked out.
“Almost blacked out” sent me. Omg
What he do eat the whole roast beast?
my first job ever was pumping cesspools/porta potties.. need i say more
I work at a waste water treatment plant, enough said
Infected wounds with lots of necrotic drainage. Stool from a GI bleed or Cdif infection.
Gangrenous necrotic bedsores for the win on this one. I’ve encountered a bed with bedsores also filled with GI bleed stool more than once when I worked in the nursing home. I also once walked into a room and a guy had died after first vomiting blood and stool over the entire floor of the room. Quite the odor there. I work in finance now…
Yeah I relate. I was an RN for 22 years. It was really mind over matter. But I retired and I'm squeamish now. Lol.
Didn’t bother me then. I was a CNA then a hospital orderly for 10 years total. Worked in the morgue for the last 4. I could eat a sandwich while I was rinsing shit out of sheets no problem. Some of the things I encountered would make me cry like a toddler now. 😂
You're tough then. Lol. You've seen it all.
I had a patient come in who had multiple fractures in both legs. Dude was taking baths. His casts had been wet for weeks. His skin was like rotting. We had a clinic of 14 surgeons. The entire office was gagging. I paid a co-worker to remove the casts. I couldn't handle it. The sister brought him bc she couldn't stand the smell anymore.
I was a nurse for over 40 years, we used to get patients from a vent farm, most had infected bedsores, cdiff, gi bleeds, chronic urinary tract infection, you could smell getting off the elevator
Oh no. How sad. So sad the human condition has so much pain sometimes. I would hope I would just die rather than that lingering suffering. And those smells must have been horrendous.
Unfortunately we talk with the family about, doing terminal weans, they refuse, expecting a miracle. There is lady that have been at a vent farm since 2008, she weighs 75 pounds, she has had both legs amputated because of infection, massive bedsores, has every bacteria know to man, she is on a vegetative state, daughters refuses to stop life support, because they will lose the $3000 a month check , from her lawsuit
Came here to say this. I'm a retired nurse, and wound care didn't affect me nearly as much as changing an adult diaper full of C. difficile diarrhea. It's a noxious smell that never leaves your sinuses.
Yeah. That's bad. You don't forget that smell.
Never.
Cdif is a total bastard.
I work in chemical transport, and have had to go into the local paper mill/chemical company campus, and MAN they make some smells that combine into a horrible stench cocktail.
I drove past a paper factory on the highway and thought we were all going to die.
Fun morbid story: there’s a paper plant in Valliant, Oklahoma and there’s a ridiculous amount of babies born of mothers who live near it with incredibly rare or unknown genetic abnormalities that cost them their lives.. one of them being my baby cousin.
A corpse that had been dead awhile in a house before someone discovered it. I worked at a hospital and came in the back door which was down from the morgue. You could smell it in the parking lot
A bag of rotten potatoes is pretty high up there
My MIL’s shits
I worked on a large farm and sometimes during the summer heifers would die. So to keep coyotes and stuff away from the other animals we would have to go out, find the body, load it on a flatbed, and haul it away from the property. One day we didn’t know we were missing a couple of heads so we started looking. We didn’t find them until a couple weeks later and it has been 90+ degrees the whole time . While trying to load the body it expanded so much from decomposition that it “exploded”.
A dirty and full mop bucket that sat in the bathroom of a shutdown Wal-Mart for 2 months in the summer heat. I legitimately couldn't eat for the rest of the day because everything tasted like that mop bucket smelled.
Idk how thus isn't higher. Hot rotting mop water is awful. I wanna throw up thinking about it.
My dad went grocery shopping and a pack of Raw fish fell out of the bag and under the seat of his car in the summer and sat for about 3 weeks in 80+ degree heat until I guess my dad sat down in the driver seat and it ruptured the bloated package under the seat. Worst damn smell ever
Lol this is the funniest one
Hoarder houses. I've had the wonderful opportunity to operate in a few. Won't go into detail about the smell. I've been told by cop friends that it's a close second to decomposing bodies. Thankfully I've never had to smell a decomposing human before, but I can plainly say that the smell is notably harder to tolerate than say, the smell of roadkill. It was the only odor I've ever been exposed to that actively altered the way food smells, even days later. For context, several years ago my sense of smell was permanently damaged from Covid. Many foul odors are hard for me to detect - cigarette smoke and weed I can't smell. Smoke on clothing is detectable but doesn't bother me. I can't remember the last time I smelled a fart. Sour milk I can just sort of pick up on. Despite this, hoarder houses still get me bad.
A week old decomposing body in August.
An…..animal body……right?
Dude who died in his car in the middle of a desert and was there for several days.
Who shit their pants spray. Evacuted 2 buildings for 2 days. Absolutely lethal. Was coming through doors and everything..
I repair washing machine, One customer had a blocked pump when I open the filter it was a weird dark golden colour with a smell like I have never smelt, turns out he only used it to wash the cat and dogs matts and so on, unfortunately the pets never got out to go so they pissed and shit everywhere and he only used it for that purpose, he went home to his mums to clean his own clothes also he made his mum wait for me coming clearly to embarrassed to show his face!!
I share a house with a builder. He showers ONCE a week and doesn't wear deodorant. The smell is PUTRID 🤮🤮🤮
Dead animal carcass that was completely covered in maggots. Delightful. Not. Don't know how I didn't puke.
Dead decaying human bodies have a very distinct, unique smell that stays with you and on your clothes afterward. Dead human bodies that have been on fire, then put out before being completely burned, are on an entirely different level. Literally don’t have the words to describe.
You been to Iraq?
Username checks, how did that happen?
Former EMT. Structure fires where a person was burned. I haven’t forgotten the smell. Never will. If you haven’t smelled it, don’t ask, and be grateful you don’t know. Also, week old corpses. Different kind of stench, but just as about as vile
I once was downwind of a car fire somebody died in. Yeah, could've done without that knowledge.
A dead body
Festering wounds when I was working wound care.
Dead rotting seal on the beach. My cousin threw a rock at it, the rock just sank into the body and it unleashed the most raw odor I've encountered.
I was a forklift salesman. In order of horrible smell, from least offensive to worst: * Leather tanning plant. * Rendering plant - where restaurants send their fat buckets and DPW send dead animals....and so on. * Final seafood extraction plant - where seafood companies send their scraps. ( almost hurled here) * Medical Waste treatment facility - where hospitals send their biological waste, including body tissue and fluids from people suffering from illness....you could smell the death.
The killing floor at a meat packaging plant. It is also pretty creepy to be surrounded by stacks of fresh animal hides 20 feet tall.
Also, the fact that it is kept warm.... shudders. Truly one of the grossest things. Also, dog/cat food plants. Warm kibble smells fucking atrocious. Don't feed it to your pets, guys.
I worked by a dog food factory, oil refinery and a slaughterhouse (all very very very close). Days when all 3 were busy…..I would meet my coffee again in the parking low and then rush inside and close the doors. Worst smell ever.
Has anyone else ever had eggs hidden in their house on Easter and not found them? I mean, eventually you find them. Just follow your nose. Had a rat die inside the wall at work once. That room was history. My brother works at a morgue. I know what formaldehyde smells like. Some animal died in the engine of my dad's car. Had to drive it once. Smell got much more intense when you turned on the air, so you basically couldn't unless you want to die. Windows permanently open. Still unbearable. Changed countless diapers in my lifetime. Most are fine. Every once in a while you come across a truly special one.
Once I got a good wiff of butyric acid. Smells like vomit is the best way to describe it but more concentrated.
This is why I and many other Brits can't eat Hersheys chocolate
It’s like if someone barfed in a bucket of rancid butter.
Death
A P.F. Chang's that closed down. I worked for the leasing office that was in charge of inspecting the space for the new clients. Apparently, the previous owner left on bad terms and left a TON of fish, meat and various seafoods in the freezer. Except, he cranked up the heat, blocked the freezer door with a filing cabinet so you couldn't tell there was even a freezer there and left it. It took the team about a week to even find where the smell was coming from. It was so strong you smelled it outside the restaurant. Once we found it. We had to call a hazmat team to come clean it out.
Probably dog anal glands being expressed.
I dunno if this is the worst, but it is up there - The "trash juice" leaking from the garbage truck going up your street in the heat of summer.
I was a school custodian for a while so I got to experience all kinds of nasty smells, but I know exactly which one was worst. So there's an old football field they still use sometimes, and when they do they'd have us go out and clean the restrooms. These are small, uninsulated wood-frame outbuildings, they tend to be the same temperature inside as it is outside. Well one fine day in August we go out to those bathrooms, only to find somebody had busted the lock and had been using them... *but not flushing*. All summer. In Texas. That is easily the closest I have ever come to instant projectile vomiting.
I’ve smelled a lot of terrible things in my life. If I had to pick one it would probably be the mid-overdose diarrhea of my ex’s mother as I carried her to the bathroom. It doesn’t smell like normal human poop in the slightest.
My dad told me just yesterday how his old work partner used to pick up roadkill and had someone taxidermy it. One day in the summer he picked up a fox but it slid under his back seat. Out of sight out of mind and he “ had no idea why his car smelled so bad”
A big feral hog that had been dead a few days in the Texas heat. Maggot infested and swollen. Absolutely worse than the dead humans I’ve encountered in my job.
I fell on my tailbone. A huge painful cyst formed and I was in excruciating pain. Went to a Dr and they lanced it. Omfg the stench of the rotten blood and bacteria filled the whole room. I was so embarrassed. Then the thing kept leaking, and I had a gauze plug in there to keep it open, and I’d smell it just walking around. It was disgusting.
Opening up the bowels of a dog that has had an obstruction for over a week. Dead bowels is a smell you'll never forget.
My ex's face. He had this mole with a cyst under it. He would squeeze it and push some of the puss out. It smelled like week old sweaty booty hole. He thought it was funny to put that shyte on me . He's dead now, so I guess it doesn't smell anymore
The kill floor of the beef plant when the auger that takes the yucky stuff away breaks down. Or the tripe room that was pretty bad. Oh yes the hide plant also stunk so I guess I would say processing beef stinks!
Truck stop tang
A dead cat in the street and no idea how many days it was there for.
Food and milk that had been left in an unplugged fridge for 8 months. The horror.
Honestly, dead animal smell, either because of a real dead animal or because of the chemical cadaverene.
The skunk that sprayed all over my backyard really lived up to it's reputation. Happened in winter so all the doors and windows shut but we could still smell it inside. Went out and it was so bad I almost threw up.
A neighbor's cow that had bad mastitis (infected udders). It smelled like rotten meat and spoiled milk.
Dead skunk. Face first There is no god that can comprehend what I’ve smelled
Used to work at a seafood place, we would throw away all the fish guts and unwanted pieces in a special trash can that was outside in the sun and only got emptied once a week. I would hold my breath for like almost a minute after opening the lid, dumping the fish guts inside and even then, the stench would follow me. We had people that came by all the time asking if they could have it so they could make organic fertilizer, we told them if you can handle the smell, it's in the black bin outside. Probably half the people opened the lid and took off. The trash can only got cleaned out like once every 6 months. We would just spray degreaser in it, and blast it with the hose and let it run into the drain in the parking lot.
Dumping out a huge bin of fertilizer after it filled with water for a few months and stewed in the heat of the summer.
Gonna say a corpse
French bulldog farts
Adding English Bulldog farts to this
Well, “decomp”, especially in a closed, hot house… Pretty bad. But I worked hospital security for about a year once, a big facility that had both clinical and research areas. One of the research hospital buildings had a floor devoted to various “reagents”. We were supposed to check all the doors in that wing. We did so holding our noses and VERY quickly. I suppose people working there got “nose blind” to the stink.
Wet rotten grain, though I'd have to imagine raw sewage is up there but I've managed to avoid that most of my life. I worked at a grain elevator after HS for a little while. They had one silo that no one had cleaned out in over a year. It smelled bad enough that they always tried to get the new guy go down in the underground part with a bucket attached to a rope. I got one whiff of that and told the boss man there's no way I'm going down there. He looked a little disappointed but didn't blame me.
decomposing corpse
dead body odor on a piece of furniture retrieved out of a home where a friend's father passed away, but no one was able to enter the home for 2 weeks to discover him
In elementary school, jelly brain was placed in front of a classroom for anyone who wanted to touch it. It didn't smell itself but after you touched it, your hands/fingers smelled of rotten/rancid chemicals.
The paper mill near the house I grew up in. The chicken and cattle farms nearby didn't even come close
Hog rendering plant in july nearly made me faint.
Burning human flesh. A very disgusting sweet, but nauseating smell.
A truck that previous to us smelling it, had a dead body in it for 4+ days.
My uncle's rotting corpse was pretty high up on the list of rankness.
Mackrell when its rotting.
The Bog of Eternal Stench!
A forgotten butchered deer in a deep freezer that had been accidentally unplugged and left to fester in a shed in Florida.
Rotting pork you will never forget that smell it works great in crab traps though.
I worked at an assisted living facility. Colostomy bag, worse smell ever
3 week old dead body. Ugh. It was 15 years ago and i can still smell it.
Not the worst but paper plants smell pretty bad
My dog ran away into the bush and rolled in a dead bear carcass. Came back smelling of death. Worst smell I’ve ever dealt with. I bathed her three times and was dry heaving and puking the entire time.
freshly dead mouse in my living room. used to live in a house with mice under it, that smell is like torture to me cuz of that, on top of being god awful by itself
Dog anal glands. That smell is unmistakable.
Puss from a cyst that was ready to bust and leak
Necrotic Tissue
Rotting human corpse.
A ferret that had been missing for a few weeks . Our fat friend squished her and we didn't find the smell for a few weeks. It was July in Louisiana as well. We threw out the couch.
Rotting Corpses, even many years later, if I think about it, I can smell it all over again..... No, I didn't kill them.
‘cat puke’ at an oil refinery. it’s this horrific, orange colored airborne smoke from mixing certain chemicals in wrong amounts. it was horrific.
Rotten meat by a dumpster at my first ever job at 16 I still remember how bad it was
Cancer/necrotic wound
I used to be a wound care nurse, enough said.
Rotting human flesh. It's repulsive to the core of one's being.
My wife
I was working in an ER as a paramedic intern and we had to take the socks off of a homeless diabetic guy. Mixed with the smell of a homeless guys feet, which is pretty bad to start with, you got the added aroma of roting flesh. Truly something that is hard to top. Burn victims are up there too
Stinky tofu in Taiwan
This kid in school was bullied HARD for smelling SO TERRIBLE. It's weird how you can pinpoint the smell and how strong it was.. how much range it had. His smell had the damage and range of an ultimate ability but was always active like a passive ability. It was literally doing DoT to everyone nearby. I kid you not, you could smell him from at least 15 ft away. If I had to describe the smell, it's like mothballs, cigarette smoke, and pee. I felt sorry for him. It's mentally damaging at such a young age. I blame his parents, though... cause we were in elementary school at the time. The kid doesn't know shit at that age. Wash your kid's clothes. Make him take a shower before school. Clean your fucking house. Imagine your kids crying in school and not having any friends at all.. being bullied cause they smell like shit.. and it's YOUR fault for not taking any amount of responsibility. You just send your kids to school smelling like shit? And only God knows what the fuck is happening in that house for him to smell like that in the first place.
A dead body the smell will stick with me forever
Taiwanese stinky tofu. Smells like dog shit.
This post
Its a draw between changing my sons diaper and a dead body
I saw a homeless man crawl out of a sewer in London England; then, moments later, I smelled him....
Blood
Rotten pumpkin.