Asklemmy

A fridge unplugged for 3 weeks with food inside that I had to clean out. I haven't smelled a rotting corpse but I imagine that it can't be far off.

I saw, and smelled, things in my medical student days that are just best not explored too deeply online. There are holes, abscesses that form in dark places, abscesses that fill with things, and age, and rot. There are things that can make even experienced colorectal surgeons get a bit queasy. The details are best left unspoken.

I have Crohn's desease and some of the smells I've generated over the years are unconscionable.

I cleared the dance floor at a club once.

It's not just like a normal person's bad fart. It's something totally different. Something evil.

Pulling out the partially decomposed hair and body fluids from a clogged shower drain.

Raw sewage. We had some leak up into an apartment back when I was a maintenance guy. The smell actually assaults the eyes first, then you start gagging. We had to lock the apartment off for a full month while the clean-up company did their thing. They were wearing full on gas masks and goggles.

When I was a kid in the 90s our dog used to come back smelling horrible. Mom always said she was “finding some dead thing and rolling in it”.

It wasn’t until 2020, when I left a potato sitting too long on the counter and it produced a black liquid, that I realized the smell was coming from that black potato liquid.

The smell of the homeless crazy person that had the habit of shitting themselves and wearing the same green winter coat even during summer. They would wander off the street every evening and you could smell their presence 30 meters away.
I remember going home every time with the smell stuck on my nostril for half an hour before I could smell anything else.
The smell was nothing I ever experienced in my whole life. I would say it was closer to cadaverine.
Its been 15 years but I can still vividly remember it.
Haunting.

A whey protein shake that I had left in my car in the summer in Georgia. It fermented and exploded in my car.

I was assigned community service by the court at the white sands national monument as a teen. They had me dumping some enzyme into the outdoor toilets, then storing them with a twelve foot spade. The smell that came out of there was mind wiping.

This'll seem unnecessarily mean but is the truth. Back when I was 18 and working as a cashier, a man and his son, both extremely overweight, went through my line. Idk what was wrong with them, but they both STANK so hard I could taste it. I went home and showered and could still smell it. I could smell it on my clothes so I washed them too. It was so horrible. I could smell it for hours. It was like the smell had been burned into the back of my nose.

To this day, if I smell something similar to that smell I remember that day and start to panic a little.

I'd left a thermos of ramen in my locker for an entire school year in middle school. First year of me having depression lmao

It smelled like if you concentrated the juice in a dumpster. Absolutely satanic sensation

I don't know what it was.

I just know that one day I got on the bus and as soon as it pulled away from the stop THE STENCH hit me. Like poop, but worse. Poop and also rotting. I don't know. I never saw the source of the stench. I grabbed the stop-request cord as I leapt to my feet and hauled ass to the exit door and tried to hold my breath until we got to the next stop.

I walked home and it took basically the whole walk to get the residual stink out of my sinuses. I will never know what made that smell and I think I'm glad.

I work with lots of chemicals. The worst smells are these that make you cry before you smell them.

Ammonia, HCl, HNO3, CrO6, and other "fun" stuff. I am getting out off this shithole without functional ventilation in month.

My dad and I had the misfortune of driving behind a truck that apparently had a load of dead cows headed for the rendering plant. No place to pass on the highway for a few miles and it was summer. Horrible.

I suppose one of the losses from Reddit is not being able to link to the "Swamps of Dagobah"...

I lived in China and don't speak Chinese. I ordered what I thought was a cheese pizza. It turned out to be durian pizza. I tried one slice but gagged after one bite. I put the pizza in the fridge because I'm dumb. One week later I opened the fridge. It was horrible.

Childbirth. It's been three times now, and it's so bad. Worse that Boy Scout summercamp latrines. Worse than when a dog farts after eating people food. Worse than a septic tank. Worse than opening a fridge left unplugged and full of food for a month.

I've smelled all these horrible things and more, and childbirth is the worst.

The code I wrote from a few years ago.

A friend of mine had to move to a much smaller apartment for a year (remember this) for financial reasons. He put a lot of stuff in a storage facility and one of it was a fridge-freezer-combo. When we finally took everything out we noticed a stenching smell. We opened the freezer and it was full of rotting meat...

Rotten ballistics gel smells a lot like rotting human flesh. So... that.

Many moons ago, I worked in a building that was next to a truck garage. On a hot summer day, a truck limped in full of animal entrails. One of its axles broke and the contents of the truck spilled all over the place, just in front of our entrance. In the sun. It was only cleaned up after several hours and the smell lingered in our office building for literal months, as the air circulation in this building was almost non-existent.

The smell itself was comparable to a very strong blood smell with a metallic, copper-like undertone.

C-DIFF. If you've ever dealt with someone whos had it you know the smell. It's undescribable but instantly recognizable and stick in your nose for days.

My smelling sense went away around 2005, so I'm happy to report this question is not applicable to me. Sadly it took away some percentage of my taste too.

When I was about 9 my family went to the jorvik viking center in York. They had a ride thingy where you could be driven around a realistic viking settlement and whatever the fuck they used to make the realistic smells of smelly vikings and pig shit really fucked me up. No one else was that bothered but I couldn't eat properly for days.

I'm guessing whatever chemical they used really didn't sit well with me. It must have had a pretty extreme effect because that was 31 years ago and it was the first thing that popped in my mind when I saw this question.

I had a pilonidal cyst once, the most painful thing I ever experienced, also the one who smelled the worst when it popped, according to a doctor it smells exactly like a corpse

The restroom of a rural Bulgarian train station. It was just a room with a hole on the ground and little to no ventilation.

My family stopped at a Dairy Queen and then went on a joy ride. We got stuck behind a truck hauling a tank of liquid poop. The cap was off and it was sloshing out of the hole. Worst ice cream ever.

Pet boa constrictor died and started fermenting in the viv. It was like a wall of putrid stench. Had to get her quadrouple bagged and taken to the vets for proper disposal.

Liposuction fat

Pyridine is pretty horrible... Don't really know how to describe the smell: like a mix of rotten cum and ashtray? It overpowers any other smells, gives me instant headaches and the stench can linger for hours.

Dimethyl sulfide is also pretty disgusting to me, kinda like... a kitchen that's been used to cook brussel sprouts for 20 years + garlic breath?

Dead orca. Came upon marine biologists cutting up and disposing of a beached orca, and the smell was like a physical wall, and then a repeated series of roundhouse kicks to the face and eyes. Just an indescribable stench, regular rotting meat dialed up to dimension-warping, sanity-threatening levels. I will never forget it. I would never ever have got closer, but my girlfriend was driving and she knew one of the biologists and was really interested to chat about it right next to the pickup filled with chunks of tail. Just unreal all around.

For me there are two strong ones competing: Hákarl, basically fermented rotting shark – this smells like a Serbian railway toilet during the war, when it wasn't cleaned for years, but used regularly. It tastes the same. The other was a dog carcass, that was left on the roadside on a nice, hot summer day, and the 'not my job' mentality left it there slowly decomposing over roughly two-three weeks.

This is harmless in comparison to what has already been mentioned, but vomit tempts me to add to the source of the smell.

Some babies have some extra wholesome smelling diapers too.

Ammonia. It doesn't technically smell bad, but it stings and does horrible stuff to you. Had the misfortune to use a lot in Chemistry and ended up puking from poisoning.

That and diarrhea and diarrhea farts.

Surströmming.