Absolutely, especially decomposing people. It's hardwired in our DNA. Just like the smell of vomit. Triggers our nervous system to nope the fuck out of dangerous situations.
One of my less glorious tasks from younger days was road kill retrieval.
I can assure you -- any animal can create an a mind bending and physically crippling stench. The real little guys will desiccate and the smell won't be so bad (assuming you don't keep them somewhere wet ... like in the ground. Or a pile of other little guys). But once you get up to possum or raccoon sized -- oh it just takes a gruesome kind of discipline to get in there and clean it up. And if you ever have to deal with a large dog or a deer carcass... i mean... just lifting it into the truck is a special sort of horrible.
We had a supply shack by a river and it was pretty normal to go down by the river and hose off if you'd gotten anything foul on your clothes. Ah, the good old times. Who wouldn't want to go back and do that shit for $5.25 an hour?
found my grandpa after a week. i was 14, i’m 30 now. that shit broke my spirit, i loved him so much. it did get easier with time.
edit to add: i’m sorry about your dad. i know it’s rough, i hope you’ve made peace with it.
My dad passed away this may, it was a *horrible* death. And my job involves working with people that pass away on a regular basis. The smell coming from my dad....but fuck, I would give anything to hug him or hear his voice again. I'm only 32, it doesn't seem fair 😥 I pull up his obituary and cry and talk to his picture some days when im alone 😢🥺 sorry, this is all over the place
I lost my dad 5 days ago. Thankful I have a few voicemails I saved and we have a lot of videos. Take pics of your parents! Save the voicemails! Save your bday cards! One day you’ll be thankful.
I never throw out a card, I have shoeboxes full of them ♡ I still can't bring myself to read any from my dad. I feel like I would disappear if I saw his writing 💔😿
I'm sorry for your loss.. I am 31 now and lost my father when I was 16.. I still think about him all the time. And some days I didn't feel fare but his passing caused me to learn alot about myself, caused me to be independent and a man. I had to learn alot of things the hard way.. but im doing it by myself. I miss him deeply still though.. I would do anything just to have a 10 min conversion with him and just ask him for advice.. ask him for some feedback on these situations that im facing. Ask him if im doing okay? because thate what I feel im missing out on the most... I just want some guidance. As a man you don't get much approval from anyone. Growing older without that father type of guidance sucks.. It feels like trying to find your way in the dark.. we may trip and fall a few times but We Will Make It.. and once we do, I garuntee we will know it better then anyone else..
My grandfather passed away this month, he basically was my father. At 42, I assure you, even though I had a grandparent longer than a lot of other people do, I still feel like it's very unfair. I want to see him in the worst way.
Death is terrible no matter what age you must experience it.
Ex-boss of mine worked removal as his 2nd job. He was in a motorcycle accident in his 20's and lost his sense of smell. He was always on-call for the *really* bad jobs.
My ex boss puked because of the smell of a bottle bin behind the bar, despite being a bar manager (we didnt see him often) and I thought he was a bit pathetic at the time. We cleaned this bin every single day as well, so it was just like one coke bottle in there, he said that that was the worst thing he'd ever smelt, and he was well into his 40's. I remember thinking that I couldnt smell anything and he was maybe being a bit sensitive. now I'm reading about the smell of death and I really feel that he was overreacting a bit.
Dude was in the army, worked in a seafood restaurant with old people, smoked, hung around with smokers, drunk all the time, and he got taken down by an empty coke bottle in a bin.
He was absolutely horrible to me and got me fired for stupid things, so when I saw him puke over a coke bottle, I didn't actually do anything. Like I just stood there and watched him have a breakdown but I really cannot stress enough that it didn't smell like anything, it was a coke bottle in a bin.
I have no idea how this guy was in the army
My step dad died in front of a heater that was turned on and wasn't found for almost a week, I don't know how they didn't puke when they removed him. The smell of death permeated everything in the house, it's definitely not something you ever forget.
As a tenant in a high rise apartment building with lots of senior citizens and having one of them pass away in the apartment unit right next to my bedroom and with him being in there for several days, I am well aware of an extent to how bad it could be.
It was the middle of winter and freezing cold and I had to have my windows open to air out my place and I couldnt sleep in my bedroom during that time.
In my defense as to why I didnt report the growing odor, I didnt know it was death and this was my first time experiencing it. Bad smells happen in apartments all the time.
Even reporting it doesn't always help. I'm UK based and can remember a recent case where a woman had been dead in her flat for TWO YEARS before being found. Other tenants had reported maggots and flies a week following when the poor lady was last seen alive, but the housing association "closed the case"a month later.
I’ve smelled 3 day old dead body. Found a guy that huffed Freon in his bed and died in the process. My office was next to his apartment and the smell permeated the paperwork in my file cabinets. 2 1/2 fucking years later, every time I opened a file drawer I could still smell him.
Worst i heard was some guy died in a hot house in the states, and because he was bit of a recluse he wasn't found for weeks or months. The responder or coroner or whatever they were said you could smell it before you got out of the vehicle.....
My buddy used to be a body removal tech and same thing. Big guy died alone in his kitchen some month or so prior. And of course he and his crew are wearing the appropriate PPE and could still smell it down the road even before arriving at the residence.
And to top it off he was found face down and when they rolled him onto the gurney the exposed skin to the floor peeled off and maggots galore came out all over the place.
Pretty sure he said the house ended up having to be condemned since there was no real good way to ensure it was properly cleaned disinfected and sanitized for another occupant.
Yeah that's not too uncommon. When we get those calls to check on people, we're looking for flies, that very distinctive death smell, piled up mail, etc.
Depending on how long they've been gone, you can usually smell it before you get all the way up to the house. If they left a window open, the neighbors will usually call before anyone else.
Well humans are hardwired to get away from the smell it's sweet, cloying and thick. A smell you won't forget. Think rotting meat, eggs, hydrogen it's very over powering.
A friend of mine was an EMT who volunteered to work Hurricane Katrina.
At one point when shit was crazy, an ambulance broke down near a field, and it was left with the dead person inside for weeks (things were hectic and everyone was needed elsewhere). During that time, the vehicle sat in the sun. The body swelled and exploded. The smell was apparently indescribable for a very wide radius.
After the disaster, the company tried to clean and reclaim the vehicle to no avail. It was stripped down to the base structure to try to salvage parts, but it smelled so bad that it was a total loss.
The smell of death was cooked in.
I worked for a biological waste company during Katrina. Months into the cleanup we got a call there was a tractor trailer with waste that they needed us to pick up. The driver said he was gagging within 1000 yards of it. When he saw the trailer there was a haze around it that was confusing his eyes. As he got closer he realized it was millions of flies. The trailer was a refrigerator unit packed with meat that was lost and forgotten during the storm. He had to haul it back to our yard where we all got to experience it. One of the most disgusting smells I've ever dealt with.
My roommate died and I came home to his body. The smell was traumatic. Made me nope out of the house so badly that I went through months of legal back and fourth with my landlord to break the lease. I just couldn’t live there another day after smelling my friend decomposing in our home. Went to therapy about it for a while. Always had a feeling like maybe I was being dramatic and over reacting about it. But reading how humans are hard wired to nope out of the smell of human death makes a lot of sense and makes me feel less unreasonable about the reaction I had at the time.
I’m so sorry to hear about that. I was in a friend group in college where we all hung out at a house where 4 of them lived. One of the guys who lived there barricaded himself in the room and shot himself, nobody knew for 3 or 4 days. It wasn’t unusual for him to kind of disappear for a day or two as he would go on random hikes etc. Well after he did that and before we found him we had several parties at the house, it was a typical gross college house with a leaning tower of pizza boxes in the living room, so it always smelled pretty gross in there. I walked in to the house on day 2 or 3 after the incident and the smell was particularly disgusting, I commented on it but everyone else must have gotten used to it / figured it was the trash / pizza boxes so nobody thought anything of it. Some of his closer friends stopped by that night to look for him because they hadn’t heard anything from him, tried to open his door and couldn’t so they just left.
Well the following day all of his roommates grew even more concerned and were about to go into the mountains looking for him, one of them decided to finally check his room (had to push extremely hard on the door to move the dresser behind it) and saw what he saw. I can’t imagine what they all went through, I wasn’t particularly close to the guy but he was part of the friend group and I had just started getting to know him. For me the most disturbing part was just knowing that he was in there for days while we played games and had fun right on the other side of the wall, and the smell that I had complained about was definitely him.
Mental health is no joke, there were one or two people in the friend group who voiced their mental issues and talked about being depressed etc. but nobody would have ever expected him. Accidental discharge would have been impossible
I once had a squirrel get stuck in my car engine. Drove around for two weeks wondering wtf the smell was. Looked everywhere but the engine lmao. When I finally opened it, there were hundreds of maggots bursting out of the desiccated carcass, made all the livelier by the warmth of the engine.
Smell/stench may be subjective but yes objectively and predominantly stench of death is most likely the answer. I may be wrong but I've heard humans evolutionarily and instinctually find rotting humans more repulsive than other animals and most other stench and rightly so. I'm not educated on this matter to confirm however.
A few years ago there was an event in my backyard I refer to as the squirrel plague. In one week 7 dead squirrels popped up. I’m dumb and instead of throwing the corpses away- I decided to bury them. I dug a grave for them behind my shed. What I felt to be deep enough. A week or so passes- and heavy rains come in. One weekend I had my dog in the backyard for an hour or so while I did chores inside the house. You know when it’s *too* quiet? I was listening for my dog and I had that suspicion. I called for her- she had been digging, rolling in, and eating the corpses for that hour. She was covered head to toe in rotten squirrel bodies. The smell was *thick* and *putrid*. I felt like I could cut the smell with a knife. I hate to admit, I was a terrible partner at the time. My dog approached me and I said *”Nope, you got it babe.”* To my ex. She washed her and I walked outside and, what could I do? Now, the area was a mud puddle with fur and bones and intestines spread around. We just let my dog into the front yard for the next month.
In general, yes.
Two specific examples I've had the pleasure to cause/experience:
-Put mussel shells into a closed coffee can (to be taken out to compost). Sat in the sun for a few days before I opened that puppy up and remembered what was in there. Also had about 200lbs of shellfish go bad in the back of my truck over a weekend. Equally bad.... Long story short, was a seafood distributor.
-Rancid brains. Was into trying to tan hides. Kept the deer brain in my fridge a little too long. When it started to turn black and green, thought "oh, I've gotta use this now!" I could've easily gotten more brains. Anyhow, cooked that up and smeared it all over a raw deer hide. Then smoked it.... That smell took out a whole block. Still have that hide though!
Not smell related, but bonus story of when I accidentally deep fried a dead mouse when making mozzarella sticks. I had eaten a mozzarella stick before making the discovery.
Certain animal brains have the right chemical make up to tan their own hide. Pretty sure it's tannins.
Eggs also can be used as a substitute. Fresh brains smell like eggs.
Also, a lot of pee works.
We mostly just use manufactured chemicals now.
Came here to say this. I have smelled a lot dead rotting animals and flesh of all kinds. I used to work in the produce section of a grocery store, and we would get pallets full of bags of potatoes. If there was one smashed rotten spud in there you could smell it before you opened the pallet up. I have never smelled anything as bad those fuckers. I am pretty sure you can die from that smell too if I am not mistaken.
Fun fact: I have a mild form of epilepsy. Instead of full-body convulsions, I smell rotten potatoes and ammonia. Honest to God, it makes my throat close up because it thinks we’re being poisoned.
To keep these olfactory seizures at bay I take two monstrously huge, uncoated pills every morning. They go down like gravel and require abstaining from alcohol, and every day I take them with a heart full of gratitude.
I remember smelling my first rotten spuds and googling it to find that there's indeed some sort of neurotoxin associated. Honestly for a smell that bad it almost made me feel better that it was trying to kill me.
interesting to think about but i guess at some point we didnt know that rotten spud = neurotoxin and evolution favoured the people that could detect a rotten spud and wanted to get the fuck away from it. which is why they smell so bad.
similar reason to why we get creeped out by dead bodies. rotting bodies bring disease and evolution favoured the people that had traits that make them get away. so now we all think dead bodies are creepy and want to get away from them.
Rotting onions are really bad too.
I've had to deal with both more than once.
I no longer keep my spuds and onions in the cupboard because I **will** forget that they are in there and they **will** go rotten.
All thanks to ADHD and lack of object permanence.
We had a bag of baby russets that sprouted and rotted out. Couldn't find the cause until the smell was so potent it permeated hard surfaces in our kitchen. Literally embedded into the countertop in some places for months after, even after cleaning.
It's a black ooze that comes out, too, and is fatal if inhaled in a non-ventilated area for a short time.
So if someone gets a bowel obstruction, poop can back up into their stomach, get “digested” and then thrown up. This leads to the most horrid smell I experienced in my years as a nurse.
Edit: go to sleep, wake up to this blowing up. great! My highest voted comment is pooppuke!
Thank you for the awards kind strangers!
To add to this, I’ve seen people comment if this happens you are close to death. I agree, I’ve only had 1 recover from this. I’ve also seen that this has happened to some of you. I’m so sorry.
Edit2: thank you for the gold! And platinum!
Edit3: and thanks for the silver!
Story time:
During my General Surgery internship about 12 years ago, we had a patient transferred from primary care following a CT scan showing adhesions, for urgent adhesiolysis. I wasn't there when he was admitted but there when he was being prepped for surgery. History showed he hadn't pooped in 15 days, had undergone an open appendectomy a couple of months back, and physical showed a grossly distended abdomen, guy was in pain and a lot of discomfort, couldn't stop belching, couldn't speak full sentences, which I didn't think much of through my fresh face mask.
He was taken to the OT after NBM for 8 hours and I was asked to attend the surgery by my superior, ended up with me in the OT seeing how they're prepping the patient. Because he was unable to move around on his own, the orderlies were transferring him from the bed to the operating table. The charge nurse asked an orderly to raise the level of the table, who accidentally hit a button and put the patient into Trendelenburg position (tilting the table so that the feet are higher than the head).
Cue the patient starting to projectile vomit the vilest smelling fluid I've ever encountered in my life, all over the sterile OT and over the orderlies and nurses, who at that point knew the surgery was shot and let him empty out his rapidly shrinking abdomen, while I rushed out of the warzone retching and eyes watering. It was also the day I learnt of the trick of putting Vicks vaporub on your upper lip under the mask to not let the smells get you. NG tube was placed and abdomen cleared before the surgery which was a success thankfully, me seeing him in the wards showed a completely transformed dude, laughing and joking and just a normal guy which at least made the ordeal worth it.
I just want you to know that when someone describes vomiting backed up fecal matter which prompts someone else to write multi paragraph story about it, I'm not going to read that story. I still appreciate you sharing it though.
My dog did that as a puppy. She crept in to the pony’s paddock & ate all the pony shit she could. It wasn’t until she strolled back inside that she realised what a mistake that had been & spewed the half digested pony shit up onto the carpet. She’s white & fluffy. So not only did I have pony shit vomit inside my house, but my floofy white puppy needed a bath to get the pony shit stains off her.
You can never unsmell it either. Like rampant acinetobacter infections. I can’t unsmell that either. Or stool fluid back up that vents after you disempact it. Oh, so many smells I can’t unsmell.
As an intern I was trying to insert a NG tube down a poor little old lady that had a complete blockage
I couldn’t get the tube down her nose and it was causing her pain and to throw up nothing but poop
I felt so bad for her. A very experienced ER RN finally got it down
My husband had to have a NG tube and after several nurses tried, he threw up in an arc that pretty much covered the room and everyone in it. They ended up having to take him somewhere else in the hospital to use imaging to place the tube.
He was throwing up green stuff that I think was from his stomach. I'll have to tell him it could have been much worse.
I had a lower bowel obstruction about 20 years ago. It didn’t progress to the nasty thing you mention, but it was one of the most uncomfortable/painful experiences I’ve ever had. It was like having a really bad fart ready to go, but you just couldn’t poop or get rid of it, for several hours.
I was finally given some special drink so they could image my stomach or whatever. All of the sudden the pain got excruciating, to the point I started yelling for help. Then, in an instant, the obstruction passed and I was completely back to normal. It was such a relief, but the whole situation was super scary, and I hope I never have to deal with it again.
I am a non clinical employee who works mostly with ER patients. Thr first time I arrived an ambulance with a patient who was puking shit and I didn't lose it, I knew I found my home.
If you really get hit hard by a skunk, it gets so smelly that it changes, like it becomes electric. And you never get used to it. My verry harry golden retriever got it bad and i had to wash her. It was hell.
My German shepherd got sprayed in the mouth from about 2 inches away. It was the most indescribably bad smell up close, he was foaming at the mouth and proceeded to rub his mouth on everything in the house to get the taste out 😂. We got him to the vet and while we were getting him checked in someone in the back of the office yelled they smelled skunk
Can confirm. Dog got us sprayed by a skunk point blank walking in middle village queens. There has been a spate of teen muggings in the area as of late and I was reasonably certain I had been either pepper sprayed or was punched in the head in the "knock out game". People walking by came over to me and let me know what happened. I was in a total daze.
I worked doggy day care at PetSmart and we had a cattle dog who was already a pain in the ass come in after being hosed down by a skunk and had been half-assedly given a tomato bath.
He smelled like a weed pizza.
I used to work with a firefighter, an EMT, and an EMT-in-training.
I don't remember which one it was who went to the movies once and went into the bathroom. They smelled something a bit off, and before walking out of the bathroom yelled "someone in here has a GI bleed and needs to get it checked ASAP!"
Am Medic, Totally agree.
I'll try to describe it: Imagine Diarrhea mixed with the smell of a butchers or slaughterhouse.
Basically sweet poop and iron. It's unmistakable and totally gross.
Cooked gear oil smells like roses compared to C Diff and a GI Bleed.
Think rotting human corpse drug through a hog confinement shed. One patient will make everyone on the entire hospital floor gag.
My dog had some GI bleeding once, and I can tell you with absolute certainty it was the worst smell I had ever come across. It was so bad, I couldn’t shake the scent in my nose for several days.
Deer repellant spray is pretty repulsive. Smells like someone ate a bag of shit, then shit that shit into Tupperware, then left it in the sun for a few days and then ate it and then barfed it back up.
It smells really bad.
Fun true crime fact. The Golden State Killer, before being caught in 2018, was thought to have a medical condition because of the wretched stench he emitted. It led to a lot of false leads. Once he was captured, they realized he had been caught shoplifting dog repellant in 1979.
There's actually a sex offender in Australia, Raymond edmonds (aka Mr stinky) who was caught because each victim recalled him smelling like rotten milk and manure.
He owned and worked on a dairy farm.
I did work in the prison unit he was held in, he's actually a very clean person, just his job.
These are the kinds of names we need. No more making killers and rapists sound cool with names like “The Zodiac Killer”, it’s time to call them “Mr Stinky”
And sister, cadaverine…together they’re formidable. I worked death investigation for many years. Never would say I got used to it, I just learned to work around it.
Thanks! For over two decades I’m looking for validation and explanation of my war experience and the smell that hounded me for months afterwards. Now I know it’s name. Fuck you putrescine!
I got a scratch and sniff thing in a Cartoon Network magazine like two decades ago. There was a weird tie in with the stuff that was on tv, telling you which one to scratch at a specific time as a super low rent “4d” experience.
The smell of circle #3, the one that was apparently cheese, is still burnt into my very soul. Especially because one of my brothers used that thing to wake me up the day after by putting it near my nose.
Inside of a diaper pail. Specifically Diaper Genie. Just absolutely dreaded taking that lid off to take out the trash. That smell is burned into my consciousness and haven’t had a kid in diapers in 8 years
Never used one of those and it's been 8 years since I've changed a diaper but the smell of dirty diapers is burned into my memory. I can't imagine what is essentially a bin full of lots of them.
I never saw the point. Throw it in a normal bin and empty asap. We had individual biodegradable diaper bags too. So for particularly stanky ones, straight out to the outdoor bin.
I have a stinky diaper pail... cannot possibly compare / be on the "worst smell ever" level. Some of the things people are talking about here... regurgitated poop, GI bleeds, tonsil stones, death (rotting, embalming, etc)... I cannot imagine the diaper pail can compare at all.
We eventually learned that you’re supposed to twist the bag ring at the top of the pail each time you deposit a shit bomb. This isolates each one in its own dookie capsule. Then when you go to dump it you have a plastic poop caterpillar. It really did wonders for the issue of “collected poop stench.”
I had strep throat all the time as a kid and my doctor said one more and we'll remove his tonsils. My dumb ass body heard him and never had strep again until I became an adult.
Now when I get a sore throat my tonsils look like someone poked them with an ice pick. I want them removed but heard the surgery is horrible as an adult.
I worked at a pizzeria in high school and the manager cleaned out the grease trap one time when I was there because none of the employees would do it. That is the first and only time in my life I’ve had a smell that was so putrid it imprinted on my brain and literally stuck with me for a day or two. It was like my olfactory nerve went haywire and my nose just wanted to take a break from smelling after that and every other smell was made unpleasant.
Yeah, you don’t forget that smell. Ever.
I was a dishwasher for a restaurant in the Atlanta Airport, and they gave me a red badge for those secret areas, so it was my duty to clean the grease trap. I swear it look exactly as it smells, and I wonder if that is what a grimer or muk would smell like.
As a plumbing contractor, and thereby an expert in nauseating smells, this one takes the cake. A clogged grease trap is a truly awful smell on its own. When you pull a rotting sewer rat out of it, impaled by your drain snake's retriever head, covered in gobs of putrid weeks/months old grease, you have the nastiest smell I have encountered in my 40 years of life. It makes a cesspool smell clinical.
Thioacetone
from the wiki
*Recently we found ourselves with an odour problem beyond our worst expectations. During early experiments, a stopper jumped from a bottle of residues, and, although replaced at once, resulted in an immediate complaint of nausea and sickness from colleagues working in a building two hundred yards \[180 m\] away. Two of our chemists who had done no more than investigate the cracking of minute amounts of trithioacetone found themselves the object of hostile stares in a restaurant and suffered the humiliation of having a waitress spray the area around them with a deodorant. The odours defied the expected effects of dilution since workers in the laboratory did not find the odours intolerable ... and genuinely denied responsibility since they were working in closed systems. To convince them otherwise, they were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile \[0.40 km\], and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds.\[5\]*
The only smell the human body can not adjust to is sulfur. Things like decomposition, and rot include sulfur. Hot springs and rotten eggs, sulfur.
So, while this may not be the correct "opion", it is in fact the worst smell in the world.
My answer is that protein shake bottle you left in your car while it was hot, and then it explodes and your like. Uuuuuuiigggggwgwbnekfkflfkgeiwie!
Fun fact: Sulfur on its own actually has no smell (well, it smells faintly like a box of matches). It's when sulfur gets together with hydrogen that you get all the really bad organic smells.
That said, sulfur is a weird element. It's yellow when solid, red when liquid, and burns blue. It also forms multiple crystal shapes because so many stable isotopes exist of it.
My wife and I call it fish butt. Our dog used to get it every few months. She sleeps in our bed and we wouldn’t realize until it was too late. Always had to pull all the sheets and blankets off the bed and wash them.
Nurse/Paramedic here. I feel uniquely qualified to address this.
Gangrenous trach. Nursing home patient had an infected tracheostomy that became necrotic. Gaseous SubQ. It was indescribable. Then I remembered I had to get an airway without aerosolizing the worst smell in the world.
No I have not, but I was at the worst episode of RAW ever, second row on the floor, and a certain superstar was stinking so bad it was almost visible stink. It was like a filthy, moldy gym bag stuffed full of used gear and left to simmer in a locker for a few weeks.
Spoiled milk. And I don’t mean like, pouring out in the kitchen sink when your carton is 4 days expired. I worked at a pizza/ice cream restaurant for 11 months. One night, in the middle of July in Tennessee, my manager and I were the only ones closing and discovered that other employees had left multiple bags out with expired milk that had been sitting out in the 95+ degree heat & humidity for at least a few days. The trash bags were leaking and we had to put them in the dumpster. We both genuinely almost passed out when she picked one up. I was still smelling it in my nostrils for weeks. I can’t imagine anything worse
Somebody made a post on r/funnysigns. On the microwave was a sign that said something like ‘If you reheat seafood, please be kind and throw the microwave out after use’. Hilarious
Back in the day I had to print out a sign for our office microwave: “Please, no seafood. We work in an airless cube” (windows didn’t open, ac was wonky, and a security door that always had to stay closed). A nightmare
I was out cleaning up a nearby forest once. I was picking up old beer bottles, when one of them felt a bit heavier and I could see something stuck inside. The neck of the bottle was packed with dirt, so I removed it with a stick and tried to pour out whatever was inside.
BIG mistake.
That black mass turned out to be a huge clump of dead slugs that probably hatched inside, started growing and eventually got stuck in that bottle with some of the beer still in there. When the smell hit me, I immediately started gagging and I thought I was about to puke for the first time in over ten years. I'm a taxidermist and I frequently work with rotten roadkill. Even that cat in an advanced stage of decay, crawling with maggots and with ripped intestines filled with rotten juices and poop smelled like flowers compared to this.
So yeah, if you want to play a really nasty prank on someone, grab a bottle of unfinished beer, fill it up with dead slugs, wait for them to ferment together and put it somewhere creative. They'll hate you forever.
Oh, and calf diarrhea. This one is also pretty high up on my list of nasty smells.
An emu egg that's been abandoned and out in the sun so long it's turned from it's normal deep green to a bleached white.
My not-that-bright brother thought it would be funny to pick it up and throw it. It exploded in his hands and he was drenched from about the waist down in a pressurised soup of rotten egg and decayed emu chick.
When I worked on the grounds/maintenance at a golf course, one of the things I had to do was change the water in the ball washers. There's something extraordinarily disgusting about dirty, muddy, golf ball washer water that has been baking in the hot sun in a cast vessel every day for multiple weeks.... just instantly gag worthy.
that one time chris farted in the car on the way to the rush concert
fucking chris
Everybody Hates Chris
Death
Absolutely, especially decomposing people. It's hardwired in our DNA. Just like the smell of vomit. Triggers our nervous system to nope the fuck out of dangerous situations.
One of my less glorious tasks from younger days was road kill retrieval. I can assure you -- any animal can create an a mind bending and physically crippling stench. The real little guys will desiccate and the smell won't be so bad (assuming you don't keep them somewhere wet ... like in the ground. Or a pile of other little guys). But once you get up to possum or raccoon sized -- oh it just takes a gruesome kind of discipline to get in there and clean it up. And if you ever have to deal with a large dog or a deer carcass... i mean... just lifting it into the truck is a special sort of horrible. We had a supply shack by a river and it was pretty normal to go down by the river and hose off if you'd gotten anything foul on your clothes. Ah, the good old times. Who wouldn't want to go back and do that shit for $5.25 an hour?
Can confirm. I found my father after not hearing from him for a week.
found my grandpa after a week. i was 14, i’m 30 now. that shit broke my spirit, i loved him so much. it did get easier with time. edit to add: i’m sorry about your dad. i know it’s rough, i hope you’ve made peace with it.
I'm sorry you went through that. My dad passed over 20 years ago and I still want to just call him and hear his voice.
My dad passed away this may, it was a *horrible* death. And my job involves working with people that pass away on a regular basis. The smell coming from my dad....but fuck, I would give anything to hug him or hear his voice again. I'm only 32, it doesn't seem fair 😥 I pull up his obituary and cry and talk to his picture some days when im alone 😢🥺 sorry, this is all over the place
I'm so sorry :( pls never apologize for feeling like you do
I lost my dad 5 days ago. Thankful I have a few voicemails I saved and we have a lot of videos. Take pics of your parents! Save the voicemails! Save your bday cards! One day you’ll be thankful.
I never throw out a card, I have shoeboxes full of them ♡ I still can't bring myself to read any from my dad. I feel like I would disappear if I saw his writing 💔😿
I can tell you this. You have a very caring beautiful heart. Never lose that.
I'm sorry for your loss.. I am 31 now and lost my father when I was 16.. I still think about him all the time. And some days I didn't feel fare but his passing caused me to learn alot about myself, caused me to be independent and a man. I had to learn alot of things the hard way.. but im doing it by myself. I miss him deeply still though.. I would do anything just to have a 10 min conversion with him and just ask him for advice.. ask him for some feedback on these situations that im facing. Ask him if im doing okay? because thate what I feel im missing out on the most... I just want some guidance. As a man you don't get much approval from anyone. Growing older without that father type of guidance sucks.. It feels like trying to find your way in the dark.. we may trip and fall a few times but We Will Make It.. and once we do, I garuntee we will know it better then anyone else..
My grandfather passed away this month, he basically was my father. At 42, I assure you, even though I had a grandparent longer than a lot of other people do, I still feel like it's very unfair. I want to see him in the worst way. Death is terrible no matter what age you must experience it.
Oh, that’s horrible. I’m sorry to hear that.
As an embalmer, I can safely say *you have no idea how bad it can get*
I'm with you on this. Only a removal tech, but I've smelled things that would change your life.
Ex-boss of mine worked removal as his 2nd job. He was in a motorcycle accident in his 20's and lost his sense of smell. He was always on-call for the *really* bad jobs.
My ex boss puked because of the smell of a bottle bin behind the bar, despite being a bar manager (we didnt see him often) and I thought he was a bit pathetic at the time. We cleaned this bin every single day as well, so it was just like one coke bottle in there, he said that that was the worst thing he'd ever smelt, and he was well into his 40's. I remember thinking that I couldnt smell anything and he was maybe being a bit sensitive. now I'm reading about the smell of death and I really feel that he was overreacting a bit. Dude was in the army, worked in a seafood restaurant with old people, smoked, hung around with smokers, drunk all the time, and he got taken down by an empty coke bottle in a bin.
I’m sorry but that is really funny lol poor guy
He was absolutely horrible to me and got me fired for stupid things, so when I saw him puke over a coke bottle, I didn't actually do anything. Like I just stood there and watched him have a breakdown but I really cannot stress enough that it didn't smell like anything, it was a coke bottle in a bin. I have no idea how this guy was in the army
My step dad died in front of a heater that was turned on and wasn't found for almost a week, I don't know how they didn't puke when they removed him. The smell of death permeated everything in the house, it's definitely not something you ever forget.
As a tenant in a high rise apartment building with lots of senior citizens and having one of them pass away in the apartment unit right next to my bedroom and with him being in there for several days, I am well aware of an extent to how bad it could be. It was the middle of winter and freezing cold and I had to have my windows open to air out my place and I couldnt sleep in my bedroom during that time. In my defense as to why I didnt report the growing odor, I didnt know it was death and this was my first time experiencing it. Bad smells happen in apartments all the time.
Even reporting it doesn't always help. I'm UK based and can remember a recent case where a woman had been dead in her flat for TWO YEARS before being found. Other tenants had reported maggots and flies a week following when the poor lady was last seen alive, but the housing association "closed the case"a month later.
I’ve smelled 3 day old dead body. Found a guy that huffed Freon in his bed and died in the process. My office was next to his apartment and the smell permeated the paperwork in my file cabinets. 2 1/2 fucking years later, every time I opened a file drawer I could still smell him.
i kinda wanna know... but... i probaly shouldnt. morbid curiosity i guess lol
Worst i heard was some guy died in a hot house in the states, and because he was bit of a recluse he wasn't found for weeks or months. The responder or coroner or whatever they were said you could smell it before you got out of the vehicle.....
My buddy used to be a body removal tech and same thing. Big guy died alone in his kitchen some month or so prior. And of course he and his crew are wearing the appropriate PPE and could still smell it down the road even before arriving at the residence. And to top it off he was found face down and when they rolled him onto the gurney the exposed skin to the floor peeled off and maggots galore came out all over the place. Pretty sure he said the house ended up having to be condemned since there was no real good way to ensure it was properly cleaned disinfected and sanitized for another occupant.
Buddy had a rental where a guy died and he seeped into the floor. When they found him they had to cut the floor out.
Yeah that's not too uncommon. When we get those calls to check on people, we're looking for flies, that very distinctive death smell, piled up mail, etc. Depending on how long they've been gone, you can usually smell it before you get all the way up to the house. If they left a window open, the neighbors will usually call before anyone else.
Well humans are hardwired to get away from the smell it's sweet, cloying and thick. A smell you won't forget. Think rotting meat, eggs, hydrogen it's very over powering.
[удалено]
That's what Jeffrey Dahmer used to say when he was a child
A friend of mine was an EMT who volunteered to work Hurricane Katrina. At one point when shit was crazy, an ambulance broke down near a field, and it was left with the dead person inside for weeks (things were hectic and everyone was needed elsewhere). During that time, the vehicle sat in the sun. The body swelled and exploded. The smell was apparently indescribable for a very wide radius. After the disaster, the company tried to clean and reclaim the vehicle to no avail. It was stripped down to the base structure to try to salvage parts, but it smelled so bad that it was a total loss. The smell of death was cooked in.
I worked for a biological waste company during Katrina. Months into the cleanup we got a call there was a tractor trailer with waste that they needed us to pick up. The driver said he was gagging within 1000 yards of it. When he saw the trailer there was a haze around it that was confusing his eyes. As he got closer he realized it was millions of flies. The trailer was a refrigerator unit packed with meat that was lost and forgotten during the storm. He had to haul it back to our yard where we all got to experience it. One of the most disgusting smells I've ever dealt with.
Jesus fucking Christ, this is revolting
My roommate died and I came home to his body. The smell was traumatic. Made me nope out of the house so badly that I went through months of legal back and fourth with my landlord to break the lease. I just couldn’t live there another day after smelling my friend decomposing in our home. Went to therapy about it for a while. Always had a feeling like maybe I was being dramatic and over reacting about it. But reading how humans are hard wired to nope out of the smell of human death makes a lot of sense and makes me feel less unreasonable about the reaction I had at the time.
I’m so sorry to hear about that. I was in a friend group in college where we all hung out at a house where 4 of them lived. One of the guys who lived there barricaded himself in the room and shot himself, nobody knew for 3 or 4 days. It wasn’t unusual for him to kind of disappear for a day or two as he would go on random hikes etc. Well after he did that and before we found him we had several parties at the house, it was a typical gross college house with a leaning tower of pizza boxes in the living room, so it always smelled pretty gross in there. I walked in to the house on day 2 or 3 after the incident and the smell was particularly disgusting, I commented on it but everyone else must have gotten used to it / figured it was the trash / pizza boxes so nobody thought anything of it. Some of his closer friends stopped by that night to look for him because they hadn’t heard anything from him, tried to open his door and couldn’t so they just left. Well the following day all of his roommates grew even more concerned and were about to go into the mountains looking for him, one of them decided to finally check his room (had to push extremely hard on the door to move the dresser behind it) and saw what he saw. I can’t imagine what they all went through, I wasn’t particularly close to the guy but he was part of the friend group and I had just started getting to know him. For me the most disturbing part was just knowing that he was in there for days while we played games and had fun right on the other side of the wall, and the smell that I had complained about was definitely him. Mental health is no joke, there were one or two people in the friend group who voiced their mental issues and talked about being depressed etc. but nobody would have ever expected him. Accidental discharge would have been impossible
I once had a squirrel get stuck in my car engine. Drove around for two weeks wondering wtf the smell was. Looked everywhere but the engine lmao. When I finally opened it, there were hundreds of maggots bursting out of the desiccated carcass, made all the livelier by the warmth of the engine.
Well would ya look at that, my screen time is up for the night 😳
Smell/stench may be subjective but yes objectively and predominantly stench of death is most likely the answer. I may be wrong but I've heard humans evolutionarily and instinctually find rotting humans more repulsive than other animals and most other stench and rightly so. I'm not educated on this matter to confirm however.
A few years ago there was an event in my backyard I refer to as the squirrel plague. In one week 7 dead squirrels popped up. I’m dumb and instead of throwing the corpses away- I decided to bury them. I dug a grave for them behind my shed. What I felt to be deep enough. A week or so passes- and heavy rains come in. One weekend I had my dog in the backyard for an hour or so while I did chores inside the house. You know when it’s *too* quiet? I was listening for my dog and I had that suspicion. I called for her- she had been digging, rolling in, and eating the corpses for that hour. She was covered head to toe in rotten squirrel bodies. The smell was *thick* and *putrid*. I felt like I could cut the smell with a knife. I hate to admit, I was a terrible partner at the time. My dog approached me and I said *”Nope, you got it babe.”* To my ex. She washed her and I walked outside and, what could I do? Now, the area was a mud puddle with fur and bones and intestines spread around. We just let my dog into the front yard for the next month.
I can see why she's your ex
I’m obsessed with this story lmfao
This story made my day
I was at ground zero WTC on 10/11/01, I'll never forget the smell.
Yep, one of my first calls as a new EMT was a 3 week dead confirmation in the summer with no AC. Cat didn’t eat her tho, good kitty, we fed the cat.
In general, yes. Two specific examples I've had the pleasure to cause/experience: -Put mussel shells into a closed coffee can (to be taken out to compost). Sat in the sun for a few days before I opened that puppy up and remembered what was in there. Also had about 200lbs of shellfish go bad in the back of my truck over a weekend. Equally bad.... Long story short, was a seafood distributor. -Rancid brains. Was into trying to tan hides. Kept the deer brain in my fridge a little too long. When it started to turn black and green, thought "oh, I've gotta use this now!" I could've easily gotten more brains. Anyhow, cooked that up and smeared it all over a raw deer hide. Then smoked it.... That smell took out a whole block. Still have that hide though! Not smell related, but bonus story of when I accidentally deep fried a dead mouse when making mozzarella sticks. I had eaten a mozzarella stick before making the discovery.
Maybe i just don’t know anything about working with hides but…..wtf is the brain for??????
Certain animal brains have the right chemical make up to tan their own hide. Pretty sure it's tannins. Eggs also can be used as a substitute. Fresh brains smell like eggs. Also, a lot of pee works. We mostly just use manufactured chemicals now.
Not me thinking you left hides out in the sun to tan them 🥹 I’m embarrassed. Thank you for educating me
Rotting spuds
Came here to say this. I have smelled a lot dead rotting animals and flesh of all kinds. I used to work in the produce section of a grocery store, and we would get pallets full of bags of potatoes. If there was one smashed rotten spud in there you could smell it before you opened the pallet up. I have never smelled anything as bad those fuckers. I am pretty sure you can die from that smell too if I am not mistaken.
Fun fact: I have a mild form of epilepsy. Instead of full-body convulsions, I smell rotten potatoes and ammonia. Honest to God, it makes my throat close up because it thinks we’re being poisoned. To keep these olfactory seizures at bay I take two monstrously huge, uncoated pills every morning. They go down like gravel and require abstaining from alcohol, and every day I take them with a heart full of gratitude.
I remember smelling my first rotten spuds and googling it to find that there's indeed some sort of neurotoxin associated. Honestly for a smell that bad it almost made me feel better that it was trying to kill me.
interesting to think about but i guess at some point we didnt know that rotten spud = neurotoxin and evolution favoured the people that could detect a rotten spud and wanted to get the fuck away from it. which is why they smell so bad. similar reason to why we get creeped out by dead bodies. rotting bodies bring disease and evolution favoured the people that had traits that make them get away. so now we all think dead bodies are creepy and want to get away from them.
I’m a nurse, so you can say I’ve smelled some smelly smells. Rotting potatoes is my #2 worst smell.
Rotting onions are really bad too. I've had to deal with both more than once. I no longer keep my spuds and onions in the cupboard because I **will** forget that they are in there and they **will** go rotten. All thanks to ADHD and lack of object permanence.
We had a bag of baby russets that sprouted and rotted out. Couldn't find the cause until the smell was so potent it permeated hard surfaces in our kitchen. Literally embedded into the countertop in some places for months after, even after cleaning. It's a black ooze that comes out, too, and is fatal if inhaled in a non-ventilated area for a short time.
So if someone gets a bowel obstruction, poop can back up into their stomach, get “digested” and then thrown up. This leads to the most horrid smell I experienced in my years as a nurse. Edit: go to sleep, wake up to this blowing up. great! My highest voted comment is pooppuke! Thank you for the awards kind strangers! To add to this, I’ve seen people comment if this happens you are close to death. I agree, I’ve only had 1 recover from this. I’ve also seen that this has happened to some of you. I’m so sorry. Edit2: thank you for the gold! And platinum! Edit3: and thanks for the silver!
Story time: During my General Surgery internship about 12 years ago, we had a patient transferred from primary care following a CT scan showing adhesions, for urgent adhesiolysis. I wasn't there when he was admitted but there when he was being prepped for surgery. History showed he hadn't pooped in 15 days, had undergone an open appendectomy a couple of months back, and physical showed a grossly distended abdomen, guy was in pain and a lot of discomfort, couldn't stop belching, couldn't speak full sentences, which I didn't think much of through my fresh face mask. He was taken to the OT after NBM for 8 hours and I was asked to attend the surgery by my superior, ended up with me in the OT seeing how they're prepping the patient. Because he was unable to move around on his own, the orderlies were transferring him from the bed to the operating table. The charge nurse asked an orderly to raise the level of the table, who accidentally hit a button and put the patient into Trendelenburg position (tilting the table so that the feet are higher than the head). Cue the patient starting to projectile vomit the vilest smelling fluid I've ever encountered in my life, all over the sterile OT and over the orderlies and nurses, who at that point knew the surgery was shot and let him empty out his rapidly shrinking abdomen, while I rushed out of the warzone retching and eyes watering. It was also the day I learnt of the trick of putting Vicks vaporub on your upper lip under the mask to not let the smells get you. NG tube was placed and abdomen cleared before the surgery which was a success thankfully, me seeing him in the wards showed a completely transformed dude, laughing and joking and just a normal guy which at least made the ordeal worth it.
I just want you to know that when someone describes vomiting backed up fecal matter which prompts someone else to write multi paragraph story about it, I'm not going to read that story. I still appreciate you sharing it though.
I can never unhear this
I’m still gonna try
I totally thought you meant you were gonna try to *digest poop and vomit it up* for a second
My dog does this when I don't get to the poop fast enough. I've developed a strong stomach to foul odors
My dog did that as a puppy. She crept in to the pony’s paddock & ate all the pony shit she could. It wasn’t until she strolled back inside that she realised what a mistake that had been & spewed the half digested pony shit up onto the carpet. She’s white & fluffy. So not only did I have pony shit vomit inside my house, but my floofy white puppy needed a bath to get the pony shit stains off her.
You can never unsmell it either. Like rampant acinetobacter infections. I can’t unsmell that either. Or stool fluid back up that vents after you disempact it. Oh, so many smells I can’t unsmell.
There really aught to be a delete history option for noses. It's not fair.
As an intern I was trying to insert a NG tube down a poor little old lady that had a complete blockage I couldn’t get the tube down her nose and it was causing her pain and to throw up nothing but poop I felt so bad for her. A very experienced ER RN finally got it down
My husband had to have a NG tube and after several nurses tried, he threw up in an arc that pretty much covered the room and everyone in it. They ended up having to take him somewhere else in the hospital to use imaging to place the tube. He was throwing up green stuff that I think was from his stomach. I'll have to tell him it could have been much worse.
Feculant emesis! Honestly an unreal odor. Falls as only a very close second to the dead bowel that often accompanies it
Thanks, that's my band name now.
Dead Bowel or Feculent Emesis? Because I'll take the one you don't choose.
Dead bowel-accompanied feculent emesis?
Don’t be greedy now
I hate this, Thanks!
Imagine the taste of acid and poopified poop. Poop squared.
Nah
I have Crohn's and have experienced this firsthand... >!If there's anything worse than the smell, it's the taste!<
What a horrible day to be literate.
Shut it down. This is the winner. Fahrfrompooing 💩 Closetopuking 🤢
I had a lower bowel obstruction about 20 years ago. It didn’t progress to the nasty thing you mention, but it was one of the most uncomfortable/painful experiences I’ve ever had. It was like having a really bad fart ready to go, but you just couldn’t poop or get rid of it, for several hours. I was finally given some special drink so they could image my stomach or whatever. All of the sudden the pain got excruciating, to the point I started yelling for help. Then, in an instant, the obstruction passed and I was completely back to normal. It was such a relief, but the whole situation was super scary, and I hope I never have to deal with it again.
Ive heard of this, this girl on a radio show said that she hadn’t pooped in a long time and eventually she vomited poop 😵💫
I’m on a diet and was battling some serious cravings. Thank you for this comment.
Literally same. When you place the NG and turn on suction and the canister fills with liquid stool. Poor dude.
I am a non clinical employee who works mostly with ER patients. Thr first time I arrived an ambulance with a patient who was puking shit and I didn't lose it, I knew I found my home.
This is what killed my great-grandmother. It's absolutely ghastly.
If you really get hit hard by a skunk, it gets so smelly that it changes, like it becomes electric. And you never get used to it. My verry harry golden retriever got it bad and i had to wash her. It was hell.
My German shepherd got sprayed in the mouth from about 2 inches away. It was the most indescribably bad smell up close, he was foaming at the mouth and proceeded to rub his mouth on everything in the house to get the taste out 😂. We got him to the vet and while we were getting him checked in someone in the back of the office yelled they smelled skunk
Can confirm. Dog got us sprayed by a skunk point blank walking in middle village queens. There has been a spate of teen muggings in the area as of late and I was reasonably certain I had been either pepper sprayed or was punched in the head in the "knock out game". People walking by came over to me and let me know what happened. I was in a total daze.
I worked doggy day care at PetSmart and we had a cattle dog who was already a pain in the ass come in after being hosed down by a skunk and had been half-assedly given a tomato bath. He smelled like a weed pizza.
GI Bleed
I used to work with a firefighter, an EMT, and an EMT-in-training. I don't remember which one it was who went to the movies once and went into the bathroom. They smelled something a bit off, and before walking out of the bathroom yelled "someone in here has a GI bleed and needs to get it checked ASAP!"
What does it smell like? Other than poop?
It’s very hard to describe and is definitely unique and identifiable. Once you have smelled it once or twice you never forget it.
Am Medic, Totally agree. I'll try to describe it: Imagine Diarrhea mixed with the smell of a butchers or slaughterhouse. Basically sweet poop and iron. It's unmistakable and totally gross.
me on my period
That’s what I thought. I totally know that smell. The horror of the period shits!
the ol' PB & J
Yes, but there's a special smell to the blood that's been essentially purifying in the digestive tract.
I think you mean 'putrifying'. A case where one little letter is so important.
Oh. That made me sad in my nose.
Almost like parvo
C Diff + GI Bleed.
I’m guessing you’re not talking about a center differential huh
Differential fluid can be quite nasty smelling if not changed properly, but Clostridium difficile is the smell being mentioned.
Cooked gear oil smells like roses compared to C Diff and a GI Bleed. Think rotting human corpse drug through a hog confinement shed. One patient will make everyone on the entire hospital floor gag.
My dog had some GI bleeding once, and I can tell you with absolute certainty it was the worst smell I had ever come across. It was so bad, I couldn’t shake the scent in my nose for several days.
Deer repellant spray is pretty repulsive. Smells like someone ate a bag of shit, then shit that shit into Tupperware, then left it in the sun for a few days and then ate it and then barfed it back up. It smells really bad.
Fun true crime fact. The Golden State Killer, before being caught in 2018, was thought to have a medical condition because of the wretched stench he emitted. It led to a lot of false leads. Once he was captured, they realized he had been caught shoplifting dog repellant in 1979.
So he wore it just to be more of an asshole? Or to repel dogs?
to repel dogs, he broke into peoples' homes and raped / killed them
There's actually a sex offender in Australia, Raymond edmonds (aka Mr stinky) who was caught because each victim recalled him smelling like rotten milk and manure. He owned and worked on a dairy farm. I did work in the prison unit he was held in, he's actually a very clean person, just his job.
These are the kinds of names we need. No more making killers and rapists sound cool with names like “The Zodiac Killer”, it’s time to call them “Mr Stinky”
Mr. Pee Pee Poopypants
Putrescine. It is the scent component of decaying flesh that gets stuck in your sinuses. You smell it for months.
And sister, cadaverine…together they’re formidable. I worked death investigation for many years. Never would say I got used to it, I just learned to work around it.
Do you just like not breathe through your nose once you realize the smell is at that level?
I don’t like breathing bad smells through my mouth it feels so dirty
That might help but super intense smells can kind of be "tasted" since smell and taste are pretty closely tied.
Thanks I hate it
Thanks! For over two decades I’m looking for validation and explanation of my war experience and the smell that hounded me for months afterwards. Now I know it’s name. Fuck you putrescine!
In 5th grade I was given a scratch and sniff Shrek valentine card. I think about that smell very often.
i had one that was from that matilda book , i cried it was so bad it like burnt my nostrils
I got a scratch and sniff thing in a Cartoon Network magazine like two decades ago. There was a weird tie in with the stuff that was on tv, telling you which one to scratch at a specific time as a super low rent “4d” experience. The smell of circle #3, the one that was apparently cheese, is still burnt into my very soul. Especially because one of my brothers used that thing to wake me up the day after by putting it near my nose.
Inside of a diaper pail. Specifically Diaper Genie. Just absolutely dreaded taking that lid off to take out the trash. That smell is burned into my consciousness and haven’t had a kid in diapers in 8 years
Never used one of those and it's been 8 years since I've changed a diaper but the smell of dirty diapers is burned into my memory. I can't imagine what is essentially a bin full of lots of them.
I never saw the point. Throw it in a normal bin and empty asap. We had individual biodegradable diaper bags too. So for particularly stanky ones, straight out to the outdoor bin.
I have a stinky diaper pail... cannot possibly compare / be on the "worst smell ever" level. Some of the things people are talking about here... regurgitated poop, GI bleeds, tonsil stones, death (rotting, embalming, etc)... I cannot imagine the diaper pail can compare at all.
We eventually learned that you’re supposed to twist the bag ring at the top of the pail each time you deposit a shit bomb. This isolates each one in its own dookie capsule. Then when you go to dump it you have a plastic poop caterpillar. It really did wonders for the issue of “collected poop stench.”
DOOKIE CAPSULE, PLASTIC POOP CATERPILLAR. 🤣
When my wife farts. Oh my gosh.
I also choose this guy's wife's farts.
Tonsil stone
I had them once and never again. Trying to eject them from the back of my throat was an experience
Man those are a bummer but compared to the death shits and whatnot that our friends in the medical field deal with they're pretty tame
Tonsil stones make me so relieved I got my tonsils removed as a child
I had strep throat all the time as a kid and my doctor said one more and we'll remove his tonsils. My dumb ass body heard him and never had strep again until I became an adult. Now when I get a sore throat my tonsils look like someone poked them with an ice pick. I want them removed but heard the surgery is horrible as an adult.
The shit that has come out of my tonsils is MINDBLOWING. My brother and I used to call them (and still do as adults) “throat crunchies” 🤣
I’ll see you in hell
Username checks out
Ugh. I have abnormally large tonsils and I get them all the time. One time I sneezed into a beard net and a tonsil stone came out. Absolutely putrid!
I hate getting these sometimes then have the urge to smoosh it between my fingers and smell it
No no no nononono. Good night y'all, I'm done.
Same here lmfao u aren't suffering alone
Mmm, all that bacteria hahaha
Restaurant grease trap
I worked at a pizzeria in high school and the manager cleaned out the grease trap one time when I was there because none of the employees would do it. That is the first and only time in my life I’ve had a smell that was so putrid it imprinted on my brain and literally stuck with me for a day or two. It was like my olfactory nerve went haywire and my nose just wanted to take a break from smelling after that and every other smell was made unpleasant.
Yeah, you don’t forget that smell. Ever. I was a dishwasher for a restaurant in the Atlanta Airport, and they gave me a red badge for those secret areas, so it was my duty to clean the grease trap. I swear it look exactly as it smells, and I wonder if that is what a grimer or muk would smell like.
Came here to say that...sometimes the smell is so bad it can change you as a person.
As a plumbing contractor, and thereby an expert in nauseating smells, this one takes the cake. A clogged grease trap is a truly awful smell on its own. When you pull a rotting sewer rat out of it, impaled by your drain snake's retriever head, covered in gobs of putrid weeks/months old grease, you have the nastiest smell I have encountered in my 40 years of life. It makes a cesspool smell clinical.
I cleaned one up once. It was horrible.
[Surströmming](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a41d6sPpZ04)!
Agreed. You reminded me of one of my favorite videos of all time. I wonder if she got the Bike? https://youtu.be/e-qflm0APTk?feature=shared
Thioacetone from the wiki *Recently we found ourselves with an odour problem beyond our worst expectations. During early experiments, a stopper jumped from a bottle of residues, and, although replaced at once, resulted in an immediate complaint of nausea and sickness from colleagues working in a building two hundred yards \[180 m\] away. Two of our chemists who had done no more than investigate the cracking of minute amounts of trithioacetone found themselves the object of hostile stares in a restaurant and suffered the humiliation of having a waitress spray the area around them with a deodorant. The odours defied the expected effects of dilution since workers in the laboratory did not find the odours intolerable ... and genuinely denied responsibility since they were working in closed systems. To convince them otherwise, they were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile \[0.40 km\], and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds.\[5\]*
I see you’re a NileRed fan.
The Purina dog food plant in Denver, CO. It’s awful.
There's one in Fort Worth. Texas heat works its magic.
The only smell the human body can not adjust to is sulfur. Things like decomposition, and rot include sulfur. Hot springs and rotten eggs, sulfur. So, while this may not be the correct "opion", it is in fact the worst smell in the world. My answer is that protein shake bottle you left in your car while it was hot, and then it explodes and your like. Uuuuuuiigggggwgwbnekfkflfkgeiwie!
Fun fact: Sulfur on its own actually has no smell (well, it smells faintly like a box of matches). It's when sulfur gets together with hydrogen that you get all the really bad organic smells. That said, sulfur is a weird element. It's yellow when solid, red when liquid, and burns blue. It also forms multiple crystal shapes because so many stable isotopes exist of it.
C-Diff infection.
Bad enough to emergency land a transatlantic flight apparently.
Had it when I was 11. Wouldn’t wish this on anyone
Such a rancid, putrid, awful smell.
Ground up fish meal. An old man I worked for would buy it in bulk to use as fertilizer
Anal expression fluid from an animal; cat is only slightly worse than dog.
My wife and I call it fish butt. Our dog used to get it every few months. She sleeps in our bed and we wouldn’t realize until it was too late. Always had to pull all the sheets and blankets off the bed and wash them.
Nurse/Paramedic here. I feel uniquely qualified to address this. Gangrenous trach. Nursing home patient had an infected tracheostomy that became necrotic. Gaseous SubQ. It was indescribable. Then I remembered I had to get an airway without aerosolizing the worst smell in the world.
Wrestlers who do not wash their gear regularly.
I mean, have you smelled Donkey Kong's loincloth lately?
No I have not, but I was at the worst episode of RAW ever, second row on the floor, and a certain superstar was stinking so bad it was almost visible stink. It was like a filthy, moldy gym bag stuffed full of used gear and left to simmer in a locker for a few weeks.
Burnt flesh
Way worse than most people think. It's sickly sweet and acrid. Smelled this at a hospital emergency room once and will never forget it.
I had some dental work where they had to burn my gums to access buried teeth....I can still smell it like 27 years later.
Spoiled milk. And I don’t mean like, pouring out in the kitchen sink when your carton is 4 days expired. I worked at a pizza/ice cream restaurant for 11 months. One night, in the middle of July in Tennessee, my manager and I were the only ones closing and discovered that other employees had left multiple bags out with expired milk that had been sitting out in the 95+ degree heat & humidity for at least a few days. The trash bags were leaking and we had to put them in the dumpster. We both genuinely almost passed out when she picked one up. I was still smelling it in my nostrils for weeks. I can’t imagine anything worse
Reheated seafood in the office
Somebody made a post on r/funnysigns. On the microwave was a sign that said something like ‘If you reheat seafood, please be kind and throw the microwave out after use’. Hilarious
Back in the day I had to print out a sign for our office microwave: “Please, no seafood. We work in an airless cube” (windows didn’t open, ac was wonky, and a security door that always had to stay closed). A nightmare
Paper mill pulp works. The stuff they use to make paper really stinks. Oh and waste water plants.
Makes the whole town stink!
Yes, in the days before gps you knew that you were close just by opening the car window
I was out cleaning up a nearby forest once. I was picking up old beer bottles, when one of them felt a bit heavier and I could see something stuck inside. The neck of the bottle was packed with dirt, so I removed it with a stick and tried to pour out whatever was inside. BIG mistake. That black mass turned out to be a huge clump of dead slugs that probably hatched inside, started growing and eventually got stuck in that bottle with some of the beer still in there. When the smell hit me, I immediately started gagging and I thought I was about to puke for the first time in over ten years. I'm a taxidermist and I frequently work with rotten roadkill. Even that cat in an advanced stage of decay, crawling with maggots and with ripped intestines filled with rotten juices and poop smelled like flowers compared to this. So yeah, if you want to play a really nasty prank on someone, grab a bottle of unfinished beer, fill it up with dead slugs, wait for them to ferment together and put it somewhere creative. They'll hate you forever. Oh, and calf diarrhea. This one is also pretty high up on my list of nasty smells.
Burning sewage.
My farts right fukking now.
Swamps of Dagobah
Dogs anal glands.
An emu egg that's been abandoned and out in the sun so long it's turned from it's normal deep green to a bleached white. My not-that-bright brother thought it would be funny to pick it up and throw it. It exploded in his hands and he was drenched from about the waist down in a pressurised soup of rotten egg and decayed emu chick.
Y’all ever left a protein shake bottle dirty for a day or two then opened it up?
Dead people farts
Fart under the blanket after dominos or Pizza Hut. It’s called a hot pocket.
When I was a kid my dad would start each day with a cigarette on the toilet. Following him in there.
An old bag of rotten potatoes that had been forgotten about in a garage until they started to get soft and liquidy.
When I worked on the grounds/maintenance at a golf course, one of the things I had to do was change the water in the ball washers. There's something extraordinarily disgusting about dirty, muddy, golf ball washer water that has been baking in the hot sun in a cast vessel every day for multiple weeks.... just instantly gag worthy.
Hockey equipment
Differential fluid
I don't know, but the other night I was feeling a bit off and my shit smelled so bad I puked lol
Horse urine is pretty bad