Tell me about the worst smell you've ever had in your home.

[milestogo]

I was in college. I steamed broccoli in a saucepan. After dinner, for some reason, I put the lid on the saucepan as if it were clean, and left it on the stove.

My kitchen started to stink, but I couldn't identify it. I took out the garbage and cleaned out the refrigerator. I scrubbed the kitchen floor and the whole kitchen.

After a week I could smell it in the whole apartment. It was awful. Finally I decided to steam some broccoli again. I took off the lid, and there it was. Easy cleanup but I couldn't believe how long it eluded me.

[hlthe2b]

1. I can imagine broccoli would be the worst. For me the one time I cooked lamb...

Never again. Not sure if I did something wrong or it was the "heavens" telling me to go with my gut and save the lambs, but it sure stunk. I can't even remember if I served or ate it, but I do remember the smell.

[calguy]

2. A dead rodent in the walls

[Diamond_Dog]

30. Dead rodent would be my answer, too.

[yellowdogintexas]

48. that is the worst, all right.

takes forever to fade too.

[4dog]

54. Yep, the invisible, unfindable, unending dead rodent wins the prize. nt

[AZSkiffyGeek]

60. Dead rodent in the dryer

Apparently it crawled in the back, and got roasted.
Took us a few days to locate the problem, and thankfully it hadn’t chewed any wires.

[Kali]

68. rat up inside the bottom of a portable dishwasher

could NOT figure out where it was coming from, thought under the floor. ugh
we are pretty sure cat brought it in, played with it and it got up in there before it expired.

[AZSkiffyGeek]

69. We had roof rats

They'd be active every fall and spring because of all the citrus and pecan trees in our neighbor's yards.Landlord wouldn't pay to do a thorough proofing of the house to keep them out, so he ended up having to replace a stove, fridge AND dishwasher that they gnawed through the wires and got electrecuted. (That's a nice smell too!)
Fortunately our dogs became very good ratters.

[CrispyQ]

3. A dog who got sprayed by a skunk.

Followed by a bookshelf made in China that we bought from some catalog. We ended up using it in the garage.

[milestogo]

4. A friend of mine rented a condo for the summer.

It had a dog door. During the day while she was at work, her chow went out hunting and was evidently sprayed by a skunk. When she came home the whole condo smelled like skunk, and she had to figure out how to clean the furniture.

[CrispyQ]

24. Oh man! I'll bet that was hard. Or expensive!

It's a lot more intense in a house than outside!!

[milestogo]

25. Never did one dog cost so much.

The funny thing is when she would get the dog groomed it would come back smelling sweet with bows in her hair. The skunk hunt was probably her way of rebelling against the prettification.

[True Dough]

5. You have some peculiar curiosities, milestogo!

But to answer the question, we once had a German shepherd who ate his own poop and then came into our bathroom and vomited it all over the floor, but it was like water at that point. Stunk to the high heavens. My wife couldn't deal with it. I cleaned it, but I nearly barfed in the process.

Lovely dog otherwise (and this wasn't a regular occurrence)!

[milestogo]

6. Thankfully, I've never had a dog with that habit.

I saw a cute young dog at the park the other day wearing a muzzle. I asked the owner about it and she said no he's not aggressive - this is how I keep him from eating poop.

Regarding the question: I know how to bring out the best in DUers.

[keithbvadu2]

7. My brother left a loose, mesh bag of onions that I did not see.

It took a long time but when they rotted, it was really bad.

[AmBlue]

8. A large, old possum died

...in the crawlspace under our house. At first we couldn't identify what it was, but by the time we figured out that it was in an area almost impossible to access and started trying to find someone who could take on such a nasty and difficult project, the smell was staggering and getting worse every day.

Even with all windows open, in the stifling Florida heat, it was unbearable. As i recall, the person that took care of it couldn't come for a few days, so we ended up spending a lot of time outdoors and away from home til they came.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

10. That happened to me too.

If you try to pull it out, the tail will separate from the rest of the body.

Good times.

[AmBlue]

27. Yeah... I think ours exploded

There was this one day that the odor increased exponentially. Absolutely horrific smell.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

29. I think I'll skip lunch today. NT

[AmBlue]

32. RFOL!!

[quaint]

9. A russet potato fallen behind the bin

...made a corpse flower smell good.

[LakeArenal]

12. OMG you are correct!!!! I once reached in the bin and stuck my thumb through a rotten potato. Argh!!!😫😠

When I worked I managed high rise apartments to college students. One time 7th floor began to stink. Really stink.

We kept searching and it just got worse. We even notified apartments that we were coming in to see if someone or thing died in an apartment.

Then the maintenance guy found it. Someone had thrown raw chicken bones behind a washing machine in the laundry.

Crazy college kids.

[quaint]

23. Eww

[LuckyCharms]

11. Skunk. Dogs got sprayed. Had to pick the dogs up...

Got the musk on me.

Up close and personal, a skunk doesn't smell like skunk. It's worse.

[Mister Ed]

14. Same smell, different source: modern pot.

An old high school friend of Mrs. Ed came and stayed with us for a week last summer. He's quite a stoner, and tokes up almost hourly.

The god-damned stuff smelled exactly like skunk spray. Made the house reek.

I'm not sure why it has to stink like that. With all the effort being put into breeding new strains of cannabis, couldn't someone come up with a strain that's really potent but doesn't smell like a skunk?

[Easterncedar]

16. That is true!

This is, close up skunk smell is weirdly different from and much worse than at a distance.

[CTyankee]

39. I had to bathe my dog with tomato juice. I was told by the vet to do this . It was awful for the dog and for me. He kept

trying to shake the tomato juice off and it got all over the walls of the bathroom. It took a long time to wash him, rinse him, dry him and clean up. I've never had a dog since. This was because he was sprayed by a skunk.

[milestogo]

72. That's the remedy.

I'm not even sure it works or how much you're supposed to use. Isn't there something that could make a bigger mess?!

[CTyankee]

74. At the time, no. This was many years before we had the Internet and Google (which is where I'd go now).

It mostly did the trick, however. and after the tomato juice I put on the shower and let that wash off and go down the drain.

Just once, but I never again had a dog.

[milestogo]

13. I lived in a building where there were squirrels living in the space

above the third floor and below the roof. It drove me nuts listening to them in the winter. I spoke to maintenance about why they don't poison or trap them. Well then you have dozens of rotting squirrels. Apparently when you manage a building this is a huge problem that you're always dealing with. The pests you can see are better than the ones you can't see.

[Easterncedar]

15. Rats stealing nesting material from under my stove

I came back from a long vacation to my rented 1802 house. I turned on the oven and a nightmarish smell was unleashed. They had ripped out the fiberglass insulation and peed all over what they didn’t carry off to the basement. (I discovered.) The stink was indescribable. I moved.

[Midnight Writer]

17. Chlorine gas.

Tried cleaning toilet with ammonia based cleaner and it wasn't doing the job. So, of course, I poured in some bleach.

Immediately felt like my nose hair was on fire. Flushed the toilet and fled the room. Opened all the windows in the house and left.

I had the "taste" of that chlorine gas in my mouth for days. Lucky I didn't do permanent damage, or even die.

[milestogo]

21. Sounds dangerous.

[Midnight Writer]

22. Didn't even clean the toilet.

[sinkingfeeling]

63. I did that once. I started coughing and couldn't stop. Had to go to the ER to get the right inhalant

to clear my lungs.

[Midnight Writer]

64. It's dangerous stuff.

[rogerballard]

18. My Mom cooking Liver and Onions...

blech...ugh

[debm55]

42. Yes, The smell of liver, to me. is sickening

[enid602]

51. liver and onions

Wednesday night was always liver and onions at our house, growing up. Somehow, my Mom cooked them in a way that left them quite moist, and the onions were never overcooked. Now I'm hungry.

[Marthe48]

19. Rotten potatoes

It doesn't happen often, and I smell the smell, have to think it over every time. Yuck.

[Niagara]

20. I unintentionally cooked a mouse in our oven.

It was January of 2017 and I preheated the oven so that I could shower quickly and start making breakfast before I left for work. I did this every morning Monday through Friday.

I turned on the oven and there was this smoke and rancid odor that filled the house. It was gross. It was putrid. It was nauseating.


One of the cats had either chased a live mouse in the kitchen where it retreated inside the oven. I have no idea if I cooked it while it was alive, injured or dead.

We had to replace the oven.

[Voltaire2]

26. I was cleaning out a brownstone in Brooklyn

This was 50 years ago. One could rent an entire brownstone for a reasonable price. We opened a refrigerator that had been left unplugged. It was full of meat. There were four of us in the room. We all immediately threw up. Just remembering it is gag-worthy.

[Runningdawg]

28. Coming home after a 4 day trip to find the upright freezer had quit on day one.

I opened the windows, pulled the dumpster up to one and started dumping meat out. TurkeyS liquified in their bags, catfish, deer...I would throw a few things out then puke out the window. I bought 50 bags of charcoal and threw it all over the floor, opened all the windows and doors, turned on the fans, then I pitched a tent in the backyard for a few days until I could breathe in there again.

[milestogo]

31. Ugh.

[MOMFUDSKI]

33. Frig died while we were on vacation. Frozen

chicken thawed and leaked. I scoured the internet for tips. A bazillion people had been there. Cat litter, charcoal, whatever. One guy said best is lots of newspaper and lots of time. So I stuffed frig with newspapers and we went on another trip for 10 days. Came home to a perfectly fine frig!!! Magic

[Lunabell]

34. I had a gas stove.

I had a shrimp boil and he water boiled over. I cleaned it all up, but after a couple of days the rotten crab smell permeated my apartment. I was a young and had no idea the top of the stove lifted up. A friend showed me what to do, and when I lifted the top, underneath was a large pool of smelly crab water. It had been smelling up my apartment for a week. Ugh.

[rsdsharp]

35. I'll sign on to the dead rodent, but the worst I've seen was when I was working as a chimney sweep.

I was called to a house to clean a chimney. They thought something was caught in the chimney. There was nothing in the chimney, or on the smoke shelf in the fireplace. Still, there was a horrible smell permeating the house.

I kept trying to find it, and ended up in the finished basement at the base of the chimney. I opened the small door to the ash clean out, and maggots fell out in a pool of nasty fluid. I narrowly avoided puking on the floor, and beat a hasty retreat.

[milestogo]

36. What were the maggots feeding on?

[rsdsharp]

37. I didn't stick around to find out. I slammed the ash clean out door and ran.

I did call a rendering plant to see if they would come out and get whatever it was. They said no way.

[milestogo]

38. The only place I would expect to see them is a garbage dump...

but there has to be decaying organic matter. I hope your customers didn't try to hide a body down there.

[rsdsharp]

40. I assumed it was a small animal. There is no way a body could have gotten into an ash dump.

There is a small opening in the floor of the firebox of most masonry fireplaces. Most are covered by a hinged lid over an opening of about 4 x 6 inches. It’s there to sweep ashes into the ash dump which is underneath in the chimney base.

I assumed a small animal had gotten into the firebox, possibly from the chimney above, fell into the opening, and died in the ash dump.

[dclarston13]

41. A decomposed raccoon

The raccoon got stuck in our wall, died, then it bloated and the carcass broke the sheetrock. It must have been in their awhile. We had to rent an industrial air purifier for several months. In the end I gutted the room and redid it.

[Elessar Zappa]

43. Well, this one time after a meal of beans and broccoli...

Just kidding! Probably a dead mouse that I couldn’t find for a few weeks. Finally found it under my fridge.

[milestogo]

45. Actually I once found a mouse under the seat cushion on the sofa.

The sofa had started smelling bad and I finally figured it out.

[marked50]

44. Wasn't quite in the house but on the front porch.

My roommates dog was into bringing dead things home. We called him The Carion Hound. One night he brought home a rather small plastic bag of something. I picked it up and the contents fell out. It appeared to be completely liquified snake, except for the bones. Worse smell I ever experienced. Nearly pucked. Just the memory makes me want to gag.

[milestogo]

46. I had a dog that would always find dead animals, but usually they were dried out.

Last edited Sun Nov 26, 2023, 05:47 PM - Edit history (1)

The exception was dead fish.

So its spring, and there's a big dead carp on the edge of the lake that had been frozen over, and he starts munching on it. He sees me coming after him and he drags it into the water and stands there munching on it. He knows I won't come in after him.

Finally one day the carp is pretty picked over, so he drags the body to shore and rolls in it. Oily stinky dead fish smell on my dog. To him it must have smelled good.

A regular bath is not going to get the smell of your dog. Some of the remedies people suggest (tomato juice!) are pretty messy. So the best cure is prevention.

[doc03]

47. My mom lived in an apartment building where one of the tenants

cooked ramps every spring. It stunk up all 3 floors.

[electric_blue68]

49. Hmmm Are they oniony?

[doc03]

50. They are like a super strong wild garlic nt

[electric_blue68]

67. Oh! Hmmm, I do love garlic, though. But maybe that'd be a bit much even for me!

There's this Historical Mansion (among others) in NYC that also sits on a fenced in grounds. One day I was visiting it. I kept smelling onions (which I love). ???

And that's how I found out there is such a plant as onion grass!

[enid602]

52. Red Tide

I think anyone growing up in coastal Southern California will agree on this one: RED TIDE!!!! And with no air conditioning in the house, there was no way to get rid of it.

[enid602]

53. whale

And of course that hideous smell of a decomposing beached whale. Other than that, growing up in the South Bay was just fine.

[milestogo]

58. And of course its not really in your home, so there's nothing you can do about it.

[Dustlawyer]

55. Thawed shrimp, chicken and beef in freezer after hurricane Rita.

We evacuated and came back to 100 plus degree heat after 5 days. Power had been out and stayed out for 6 weeks while crews were working hurricane Katrina.

[electric_blue68]

56. Omg So lucky I never had dead rodents. But...

@Home.
A smell got worse, and worse in the kitchen. My mom was in the hospital. My dad and I couldn't find anything for hours, a ?day or two until I finally caught I'd left one small greenmarket tomato up at the corner of the freestanding cabinet we had that was underneigth the built in cabinet right above it. It wasn't that easy to see. It had started to rot. Blargh!

@Work
I did freelance old fashion paste up and mechanicals with a college friend about 2 weeks/month at Schoolastic Magazine's HQ.
Well one day a smell began. It got worse, and worse over 2 days?! GAK! We looked everywhere! Really thought it was a dead mouse. Don't know why we didn't, or had maintainencece pull the cabinets away from the wall!
But that wasn't it!

Somehow I finally figured out it was my adjustable lamp (think Pixar logo vid short)!

My friend before I came in to do my work had put a new lightbulb in it
However it was a ?75W for a ?60W lamp! The heat began to create fumes from the paint inside the cone of the lamp!

We were probably very lucky we 1) didn't get sick, 2) had a fire start! 😮

@back Home
This one was expected. My mom had various succulents, and a cactus or two. One bloomed big (sort of freaky, Interesting) 1/yr but smelled I guess like a corpse. Omg we'd get a few flys buzzing around it those few days. 😮😄

[Funtatlaguy]

57. Any of my Trump supporting family members.

[Bayard]

59. Two contestants

When I lived in Cincinnati, we had a large log home. Every wild critter seems to think they are a pile of sticks to nest in (same for our log cabin here, but that's a different tale.) We kept seeing a squirrel going in the vent under the second story roof. So, the ex climbed up there and put something across it. Problem solved. Until we realized, it had been a mama squirrel, and we'd closed her off from a nest of babies. For a few weeks, every time the furnace would kick on, we'd smell dead baby squirrels through the vent. There was no way to get to them. I think they finally mummified.

Second story, from the Calif. stint. I had left a garden sprayer on the back porch in the fall, with the cap ajar. In the spring when I went to use it, a big liquified rat poured out. It would have curled your hair.

[JoseBalow]

61. Fed my python a rat

a few days later, it got regurgitated

[LisaM]

65. My mother took crab fondue to a party once.

Afterwards, they gave her what she assumed was an empty and clean fondue pot in a bag. Months later when we were going to have fondue again, we discovered the host had just slapped the lid back on with leftover dip still inside and you haven't really lived until you open a pot of three-month old crab fondue that has been sitting on a shelf. Luckily it was summer so we opened the windows and left the house for a few hours.

[Ocelot II]

66. We collected some shells in the ocean when visiting Florida as kids,

took them home and put them away somewhere. Unfortunately some of the shells had still been occupied by the corpses of their owners, and when they rotted after a little while...

And then there was the time we thought there was a dead body in the wooded area behind our house. This wasn't in the house, but the smell was so awful it deserves reporting. And we discovered that there really was a dead body out there, just not a human one; it was a deer that had passed away from unknown causes.

[Boomerproud]

70. Burnt popcorn

Made me gag.

[RobinA]

71. That's A Tough One

Can't decide between dead rodent under the floorboards, skunk-sprayed dog in the house, or burnt popcorn. Getting a cat who doesn't go outside solved two of those perennial problems. I lost my taste for popcorn, so I don't run into that much either.

[RobinA]

73. That's A Tough One

Can't decide between dead rodent under the floorboards, skunk-sprayed dog in the house, or burnt popcorn. Getting a cat who doesn't go outside solved two of those perennial problems. I lost my taste for popcorn, so I don't run into that much either.

Oh, wait. Then there's the time my friend's boyfriend in college caught some fish before spring break, put it in the refrig in his dorm room, ASKED would the electricity be kept on, was told it would, and then left for break. Needless to say, the electricity was turned off. Try getting rotten fish smell out of a dorm hallway!