What's The Worst Thing That You've Ever Smelled?

[Yavin4]

I bought onions once and left them in my cubbard for about 6 months. The smell almost knocked me out.

[GOPisEvil]

1. I worked near a meat-packing plant.

When the wind blew the wrong way...well, let's say it wasn't pleasant.

[Lyric]

2. Republican anxiety

on Nov 7th. Booyah!

[Lyric]

50. In all seriousness--dead chickens in 1996

I was living in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia when Hurricane Fran hit the Atlantic Coast. By the time it got to us, it was a Tropical Storm, but it still dumped a LOT of rain on us. We wound up with the worst flooding I've ever seen in my life.

There were chicken and turkey farms EVERYWHERE in the Shenandoah Valley, so when the high water hit---lots and lots and LOTS of dead poultry. It took weeks to get the millions of dead birds cleaned up. In the meantime, the smell was absolutely horrific. *feels queasy*

[BlueStorm]

3. I can't really smell that much...

I have some kind of olafactory nerve damage so I can barely smell. But if I got to say the worst thing I ever smelled a skunk of course. Right. By. My. House.

I was 17 years olds then and the smell was so bad we had to close all of the windows, and it was 85 degrees out. In the night.

Blue

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. When I was a kid, we used to cross from Minnesota into Canada

at International Falls/Fort Frances.

The paper mill smell was always bad, but one day, it was so strong and overpowering that we all started coughing. Yet the customs officers on both sides of the border seemed unaffected.

[Left Is Write]

49. They'd probably grown accustomed to it.

A few years ago, I discovered that sugar beet processing plants smell even worse than paper mills.

[Floogeldy]

5. A dead human body.

Don't ask (it is the worst smell in the world).

[Porcupine]

9. undiscovered for a week. Last July......

here in Chico CA. The poor guy had got sick and turned his AC system to heat, lost control of hid bodily funcitions and died. We didn't find him for 5 days of seriously hot weather.

I had to co-ordinate the cleanup after the coroner was done. I had to change my clothes after 10 minutes in the apartment.

Worst smell EVER!!

[RebelOne]

65. I can agree with that.

I discovered my next-door neighbor's body. She had been dead for 5 days in a hot mobile home. Can never forget that smell.

[Maddy McCall]

6. A body retrieved from a house fire.

I can still "smell" it.

When I was a kid, I accompanied my father to calls (he was asst. chief at the FD here--where I'm now a first responder). He got a call one night--house on fire. We were the first to arrive. We got one elderly lady out, but then the fire became so intense that he couldn't go back in. The elderly lady's mother was still in the house. She was disabled, and there was just no way to remove her from the house--it was completely engulfed.

After the FFs extinguished the fire, my father and the chief went in and retrieved the body. They brought it out on the grass. I was standing nearby. I'll never forget that stench.

Some people might disagree with my father bringing me to fires, but you cannot know what an insistent kid I was. I would have gone, if I had had to hitch-hike to get there.

[otherlander]

7. Something went wrong in one of the science labs

and the entire hallway filled with fumes. It wasn't really the smell, though, so much as the nose pain...

Other than that? There was a fire in a factory when I was going home along a highway.

[greatauntoftriplets]

8. Dead skunk in the middle of the road....

stinking to high heaven. Fresh dead skunk, to boot. No, I didn't hit it.

:puke:

[Porcupine]

11. I like just the faint hint of dead skunk in the air.

Don't ask how I got that bit of conditioning.

[BrotherBuzz]

23. I enjoy faint skunk musk

A very interesting, almost seductive smell. I can't say the same for dead rotting skunk smell. :shrug:

[Kali]

39. Same smell as what those teenagers were growing in the back corner of the yard. heh heh

:smoke:

[BrotherBuzz]

41. Skunk Weed?

:crazy:

[Whoa_Nelly]

69. How about hitting a skunk?

O. M. G. ! :wow:


When you're in the Minnesota woods, better get to closest destination possible to wash car in hot water and soap!

[Drum]

10. Durian fruit

...seemed to be huge quantities, wherever I went in Singapore. The fruit are quite popular there, but I couldn't abide it.

[Jean Louise Finch]

14. once you know what the smell is

and you know how heavenly it tastes, it's not so bad to smell, I reckon. I quite like the smell as it means there is durian nearby for me to eat!

The worst smell I've ever smelled is something i have to walk by every day. There is a coffee shop in the big street close to me, which I have to walk down to get to my public transport of choice. I think they must just dump the leftover milk each day down the side of the road, as it is the rankest, foulest, most vomit-inducing stench I've ever imagined. When it's upwards if 90 degrees every day, the rotting milk produces this smell that cannot be tolerated.

[momophile]

29. didn't one of the past rulers of Singapore outlaw it

because of the smell? I don't know who this was, though. It's pretty bad, I agree.

[tinfoilinfor2005]

12. Maybe not the worst, but to this day I still can't stand the smell

of liver cooking. Makes my gag reflex really get going.

[freethought]

13. It's called mercaptoethanol

Ethanol that has an organic sulfur chemical group in its molecular formula. I used to work for a company that handled hazardous wastes. We were pouring off solvents and stuff into bulk drums, someone on the crew poured off a bottle of this s__t and the vapor went up the venting system to the outside. The odor wandered over the industrial park area where the plant was located. Our neighboring companies called the Fire Dept. reporting a gas leak. Eventually they traced it to our operation. The Fire Department officials, the town, and the neighboring businesses were NOT happy. Buildings had to be evacuated and a great deal of work time was lost. It spelled the beginning of the end of the facility I worked at. It is totally shut down now. A salesman for the company was on the road on his way back to the office and he could smell the stuff from nearly a quarter mile away. He wasn't present to see the incident but he knew by instinct that something had gone wrong in the plant.

This stuff is foul! A good whiff of this stuff can have you losing your lunch in seconds and it gets everywhere. Only problem is that it get used in biotech research quite a bit for some purpose.

[deucemagnet]

24. It's used to polymerize acrilamide into polyacrilamide gel.

Polyacrilamide gel is mostly used to separate proteins by size or charge. Yeah, mercaptoethanol is kind of pungent, but not the worst thing I ever smelled in a microbiology lab. Then again, I've only ever used small quantities of mercaptoethanol.

[ruiner4u]

15. a preserved cat

that I had to dissect for a class... I tried to find the stuff that Jody Foster put under her nose in Silence of the Lambs but a professor told me it didn't exist and to try Vaseline but that didn't help.

I ended up dropping the class...:)

[pitohui]

27. it exists, your professor was wrong -- vic's vaporub!

c'mon what's the name of that stuff? tip of the tongue, i had terrible respiratory diseases and allergies as a kid and i had to put that stuff in my nose all the time

aha, i'm not sure of the spelling, but it's vic's or vik's vapo-rub, ask at the drug store, an older person will know

in theory it will make you unable to smell a dead body and in the murder mystery literature all good inspectors swipe some under their nose before inspecting the stinky dead corpse

maybe when asking at the drug store, just say you need it because your SO has the sniffles...

[Tess49]

53. Mentholatum works. I work in health care. Occasionally

a patient will smell so bad that the odor permeates everything. Dab a bit under your nose and this helps a lot.

[ruiner4u]

56. glad for info.. but this was a few years ago...

the smell, blood, and watching a surgery from start to finish ended that path for me...

I tried veterinary for a year but ended up ducking out after I figured out that I am one of those squeamish types.. I did TRY...

:)

[mike_c]

16. I once helped a friend dig out a big industrial chicken rearing house....

It was 100 m long, with a central aisle wide enough to drive a Bobcat down, then elevated, slatted platforms on either side of the aisle for the length of the barn. The platforms were about 10 m wide at a guess. They were about 4 feet off the ground. The chickens lived on the platforms. Their height had been precisely predicted at the depth of one year's worth of liquid manure accumulation below the platforms, which heaved queasily just an inch or so beneath the slats. Our job was to disassemble the platforms and move them out so we could drive a Bobcat loader in and scoop out the mostly liquid manure, which we loaded into dump trucks. It took three days. There were some chickens trapped in the manure, weakly struggling.

When we first entered the barn the smell took my breath away, literally. As I walked deeper into the barn the ammonia concentration became high enough that my throat seized. I began gagging involuntarily. We started work at the open door end so that we could get accustomed to the awful smell as we worked deeper into the barn. I threw my clothes away after we finished the job.

[pitohui]

28. ph yeah chicken coops

that's another bad one

but i still think paper mill beats it out

[fudge stripe cookays]

17. Sour milk or Pine Sol.

Both cause an instant gag reflex I cannot control. :puke:

[martymar64]

18. 3 month old moldy pork roast

I had it in my fridge in some tupperware. When I opened it, a palpable wall of stink roared out and I immediately threw up.

[Deja Q]

19. Asphalt rendering plant or the place where they turn critters into hot dogs...

:puke:

[MissB]

20. First stage of the sewage treatment plant.

Yeah, fun class outing. Sheesh.

[fleabert]

21. the infection in my belly after my appendix surgery...

the drain was inserted while I was awake, and when the tube hit the infection (and O2 hit the infection) Holy Shit.

OMFG. awful. it filled the room.

[SacredCow]

22. Mayan Crude Oil...

It's overwhelming with Mercaptan sulfur and Hydrogen Sulfide.

If the stench doesn't get you, then the H2S will....

[sakabatou]

25. Whenever my dog rips one...

[Kali]

42. ...

:spray: ... yeah we had one of those kind of dogs, when I was a kid. Her name was Taco. her farts were house-evacuating :puke:

[TheBaldyMan]

61. I had a dog that rolled in fox-shit and that was harsh ...

the thing is, the dog thought it was a lovely smell and wanted to share.

IIRC it took three shampooings before anyone could bear to have him in the same room.

[pitohui]

26. paper mill

altho i'll accept the meat-packing plant answer, that's pretty bad too

onions in the cupboard for six months? all mine did was start to sprout, so i cut up the rest of them and put 'em in the freezer, the ones that were well sprouted i planted? i mean onion does have a smell but don't get me wrong, maybe my allergies killed off enough of my smell receptors that it doesn't bother me?

[Kali]

46. if they start getting slimy and rotten they can be pretty bad, but spuds are worse.

[momophile]

30. dead animals in necropsies nt

[graywarrior]

31. Tripe cooking

Holy christ, is that awful

[Mz Pip]

48. That's it.

It's the only thing I've ever smelled that I thought I might just pass out from. Someone brought a pot of boiled chittlings to a pot luck and as I was walking past, the line slowed down next to that pot. I actually felt faint. Horrible horrilbe smell. :puke:

Mz Pip
:dem:

[Kickin_Donkey]

32. Decomposing animal flesh ...

When we were kids, a couple of times cats crawled under our house and died. The stench would come up into our house. That's the worst smell I've ever experienced. It would make us gag. It's a unique smell that you can't forget.

I can imagine what a rotting human corpse would smell like. The smell of death.

[spindrifter]

33. West Point Sewage Treatment Plant

The stench stayed in my nose for days. It was just un-freaking-believeable!

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

34. A dead deer in the woods behind my parents' house.

It stunk horrendously. I was convinced there was a dead body (human) out there until we discovered it was a deer. Ewww.

[Generic Brad]

35. Dorian fruit opened and left outside on a 90 degree day.

Some people love it. I will never be one of them.

[u4ic]

47. It's durian

:hi:

[Race4Peace]

36. this peculiar odor on 3rd hallway at school...

I have no idea what the bloody hell it is, but to describe it, it smells like someone took a shit in a bowl of lemon juice and let it marinade for a week.:puke:

[leftofthedial]

37. dead raccoon

under bushes

side of my house

where it was located, we couldn't find it for days

[swag]

38. coyote bait

[njdemocrat106]

40. We had a mouse problem one summer

My family and I were leaving for vacation, but because of this mouse problem, we left a few "humane" mouse traps around (they're plastic cubes that the mouse can get out of; when we catch them, we just walk down the block and release them). Obviously, a mouse probably entered the trap the day we left, and a week later, we came home to a godawful stench. It took us a few minutes to realize there was a dead mouse in one of the traps. One of those little suckers sure caused enough stink, I tell you.

[Kali]

43. I have smelled some disgusting things; dead animals in all states

of decay, skunk right out the bedroom window, stink bugs squashed on the kitchen floor, baby puke and shit, drunk puke, all kinds of rotten refridgerator gunks, infected woulds, sink drains, sewers, all kinds of animal shit, but probably what takes the prize would be rotten potatos. ech makes me gag just thinking about it.

[SeattleGirl]

44. A sausage-casing plant I had to go to once for my job.

I nearly threw up during the time I was there, and was nauseated for about 3 days after that. :puke:

[BreweryYardRat]

45. Rotting rat.

Senior year of high school, a rat died in the wall of one classroom. The smell was so bad, it gave me a headache.

[RevCheesehead]

51. You mean today?

That's a tossup between the litterbox and the kitchen garbage can.

[QMPMom]

52. A dead moose alongside the road on the

Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia. It was awful and a bear was pawing through it.

[XemaSab]

54. Rotten food, dead animals, and chicken sheds are pretty bad

But one morning on the way to survey we hit a skunk and lemme tell ya, walking up the hill covered in skunk spray tears were rolling down my face and I felt like I was going to retch the smell was so bad. :(

[XemaSab]

55. Metapolyamorous

It's a decay product of polyamoride, and holy shit does it ever stink! :o

[Godhumor]

57. Natto--The worst smelling, the worst tasting, and the worst looking food in existance

God only knows why it is so healthy when everything else screams out "stay away"!

[mduffy31]

58. A 2 week old corpse

...of a guy who died on the toliet.


I am not kidding I worked for a funeral home, and that was part of my duties, picking up the deceased. When we got there the police were outside vomiting, right there I knew this was going to be a bad deal.

[TheBaldyMan]

59. Badly blocked drains & sewer, the gas buildup was incredible

it nearly knocked the plumbers on their butts. Nobody would believe the tenants in my block about how bad the smell was until the guys got the hatch off the sewer, then there was an almighty blowback.

Whoooo-eeee!

[enigmatic]

60. Bill Wetzel's Laundry!

And he wonders why I don't back to Arizona to hang out w/ him!:)

[Zynx]

62. Septic tank.

Hands down.

[NC_Nurse]

63. That's a toughie.

So many to choose from.
GI bleed.
Infected sputum.
Gangrenous appendage.
Lanced decubitus ulcers.

I find a mask with a bit of toothpaste inside does wonders to keep the nausea at bay.

[Bassic]

64. Yeah, onions and potatoes for me.

I actually had to run to the toilet after disposing of them. (I'll spare you the details)

[noonwitch]

66. Rotting produce

I had to go to a home once that was located in the neighborhood right behind the produce terminal in SW Detroit. It was 100 degrees out that day, and the dumpsters with all the bad produce was right across the street from the house I was visiting-there were flies everywhere, and the smell was overpowering. I felt so bad for everyone who lived in that area.

Not to mention that this is not far from the refineries and Zug Island, which have smells of their own contributing to the overall odor of the area.

[MorningGlow]

67. Kid vomit

In an elementary school hallway, covered in that sand-type shit by the custodian and left there for a while to soak up. Ewwwwwwwww. :puke:

[BigMcLargehuge]

68. pizza place grease trap

used to have to clean it by hand, i.e. bail it out with a small bucket, then a ladle into a 55 gallon trash can. Immediately following that on the "smells so bad you never forget scale" was the Vitrified Grinding Wheel plant I visited as a Vocational student.

[Zomby Woof]

70. Kiko's shit in the litter box

I need a haz-mat suit just to get within 25 feet of it. x(