What is the worst smell you have ever experienced?

[Stuart G]

For me, a very very dirty washroom, in the Cook Country Forest Preserves.

[Roon]

1. I was driving truck and stopped to unload in New Orleans.

I decided to walk a block to the corner store and get me a pack of smokes while they unloaded my trailer. As I was walking back I lit a cigarette and took a drag and smelled the most worst smell...it stopped me in my tracks. That is when I saw it, it was a decaying dead Armadillo on the side of the road.

I never smoked that brand of cigarette again.

[Wapsie B]

2. Rotting soybeans.

Makes manure smell like Channel #5.

[XemaSab]

3. Loon shit

It was so bad it made my eyes water.

Picture a thousand rotting dead salmon all condensed into two cups of white goo.

[BeachBaby]

4. The putrid odor of human decomp.

Long story - but it was work-related, and I hope I never have to do that again. :puke:

[Arugula Latte]

5. An open-air, fly-filled meat market (not a bar -- a real market that sells meat) in Mazatlan

Holeeeee Mierda! x(

And I don't even like the smell of fresh meat, nor cooking meat.

[TroglodyteScholar]

6. The communal bathroom in one of my college dorms

It had a tendency to back up frequently, but the odors that emanated from it far surpassed any mixture of feces and urine I've ever experienced elsewhere.

[DainBramaged]

7. Inside of a garbage truck fixing the ram (long ago)

makes my nose burn just thinking about it.

[hobbit709]

8. Rotting burnt humans

I'll never get that out of my mind.

[Bucky]

12. It's important to keep them fresh

[Fran Kubelik]

32. I'm sorry you experienced that.

:(

[Bucky]

9. 2 and a Half Men on TV

[mainegreen]

10. This medicine factory one block upwind in Delft, Holland.

Smelled like bromated barley nuclear lead with a cinnamon-cyanide aftershock and a hint of puke. When that factory vented the air was UNBREATHABLE. God. It's the only smell I can actually close my eyes and smell, *really* smell, from memory.

That bad.

[rug]

11. Secaucus, NJ

[LeftyFingerPop]

14. .

:rofl:

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

13. A deer carcass in the woods behind our house.

We were sure there was a body back there...

[VenusRising]

15. The flesh fly room at the lab where ZI works.

It is so disgusting I can't even stand outside the door. I have to walk down the hall a bit or sit in his office. They raise flesh flies for cold research on beef liver. Maggoty beef liver.....:puke:

[ElsewheresDaughter]

16. one summer went on vacation for 8 weeks and got back to the smell of a 5lb bag of rotten potato

[Cabcere]

28. Oh geez, rotten potatoes are awful!

:puke: My coworker and I ended up with a similar situation a few years ago - one of the instructors had requested potatoes for some kind of craft project, but somehow one of us misread the date on the class information sheet, which meant that we bought the potatoes about two weeks earlier than we needed them. Being fairly naive college students, we figured it wouldn't be a big deal...but boy, were we wrong!

[GOPisEvil]

17. Beef rendering plant.

[busybl]

22. ew

and vis-king in Chicago.
they make (prepare?) sausage casings.

[lazyriver]

38. Bingo. I visited one when I used to sell chemical processing aids.

Hell on earth...well, in Alabama, to be specific.

Whew.

[struggle4progress]

18. Cleaning the greasetrap for a communal kitchen: the dishwater

was piped to small covered concrete box outside, that efficiently collected the oils and fats from the water, while the water slowly drained into the ground. From time to time, putrefying rancid sludge had to be scooped out. The box was pretty deep, and you had to reach down to shovel out the gunk with a can, so you couldn't avoid repeatedly getting a good whiff -- and just about everybody who did this retched. It was much much worse than pumping the cesspool

[Mojambo]

19. Went to help a friend move an old refrigerator that had been sitting in a garage for a few years

While moving it the door accidentally swung open and the rotting food smell was... Unfuckingbelievable.

[Condem]

20. Just graduated from college, Stuart G

Living with a bunch of college buddies in Rutherford, NJ. They all worked days in NYC. I worked nights, driving a cab. Anyway, I awoke one day to my best friend bare-ass farting two inches from my face. Burped that horrible smell, all day.

[busybl]

21. dead body

[CatholicEdHead]

23. Commercial Turkey manure pond in rural NW Iowa

It took my breath away. Yuck.

[BlueIris]

24. Melted plastic.

Happened a couple of times in my childhood/adolescence, thanks to dishwasher accidents. Doesn't help that that shit is toxic.

[applegrove]

25. I was working at H & R block. Some guy came up to me and breathed on me. It is a long story but that

was the worst smell I've ever smelt.

[Danger Mouse]

26. Skunk. It's every bit as fucking horrible as nature intended it to be.

[Cabcere]

27. Ugh, that's a tough one.

I've been in portable toilets at rowing regattas, and all of those are pretty horrid - especially the time I had the misfortune to enter one where the urinal was stopped up. :puke: (Seriously, don't ask. It was awful.) :scared:

One of the academic buildings at my university always smelled fairly disgusting, and a few months ago when they were doing repairs they found the source. Turns out the last time repairs of that magnitude had been done was twenty years ago...and in the course of those repairs, someone forgot to close a sewer drain. So it remained open for twenty years, and caused the entire building to smell like raw sewage.

For the absolute worst smell I've ever experienced, though, I think I'm going to have to go with the time my little brother farted into an oscillating fan in our basement. :puke: I don't know what the kid had been eating, but holy cow, that was ferociously nasty!

[yellowdogintexas]

29. got downwind of a paper factory in Savannah GA and nearly passed out

I just thought a pigsty was bad.

[PaddyBlueEyes]

30. Ground Zero NYC

09/12-09/20/01....I can still smell it.

[Burma Jones]

35. Ditto........

There wasn't enough rain to wash it away for weeks.....

[NYC_SKP]

31. Dead Body, NYC, Lower East Side, Houston between B and C.

In an abandoned building, a season or two old.

[no name no slogan]

33. Pull my finger and find out

[NJmaverick]

34. Too many bad ones to say which was the worse

been an EMT for 23 years and I worked in a hospital for 15. If there is a stench, I have probably experienced it.

[seemunkee]

36. Rotting deer on the side of the road while biking

Going up hill breathing hard and no way to speed up to get past it quicker.

[blondeatlast]

37. Durian at the Langkawi, Malaysia airport--and I've experienced the smell of

a rotting himan corpse; pervasiveness was the culprit here.

It was easy to get away from the smell of the corpse (just go outside)--I was stuck with the smell of the durian; there was no way to really get away from it. Godawful--and it isn't nearly as tasty iimho as it's said to be.

I shudder just thinking about both.