Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Worst stank you ever smelled?

When I was an undergrad there was a student well known for terrible BO. You could tell which classroom he would be in by all of the other students waiting in the hallway until he chose his seat. Then they would enter and arrange themselves as far away from him as possible.

Dead whale is bad. During whaling season sometimes a whale dies and goes to the bottom. If they can't get to it, it's just lost. After it lays there a while it starts to rot and then floats to the top and drifts the way of the seas, which is usually toward the beech. It attracts polar bears from MILES. Seriously bad smell. Eskimos call them "stinkers" for a reason.

One time in Barrow somebody called the store I worked at and ask if we could deliver some 1/4" plywood. They were working in a big shop wearing tyvek suits because the odor would even attach itself to their clothes. They were working on their skin boats with Uguruk skins (bearded seals) and I came walking in with that sheet of plywood. I couldn't get out of there quick enough to keep from puking on the floor. Horrible stuff.

I always make it a point to pee before I leave home if I'm going there. It used to me MY Rural King, but it's gotten so nasty, I've started going to one in Madisonville, KY.

I've loaded a few bodies in bags. Found a guy last May that hadn't been seen in over 2 weeks. He LOOKED worse than any I've ever seen, but the wind was just right and the smell wasn't as bad as I expected. And the Vicks vapor rub in the nose really works. It's not just something you see on TV. The one that I can still smell I pulled out of a river after 3 days.

Didn't your daddy teach you anything?
Finger test it while your kissing, sneak a sniff.

Dam,
Though everyone knew that!

Partially decayed burning bodies

That Vicks Vapor rub trick was something I learned in the Coast Guard. It works and I still use it now, having a mustache helps. Never, ever stand over a body that has been found floating face down for a few days. When you roll it over, and the air escaping from the lungs and stomach hits you in the nose, you've learned a lesson that won't have to be repeated. That's usually a job saved for the FNG.

Badly rotted humans. Two different occasions. Everything else is like honeysuckle after that.

When we were shrimping in SC we would head the shrimp on the way back to the landing and dump the heads in a dumpster near the ramp.
Rotting shrimp heads have a very special smell.

had the misfortune of sharing a gen chem, chem lab and a watershed hydrology class with a scumburger of similar description. The guy said he had several "strokes" and aparently that cause a person to smell like cat shît, cat urine, puke, and cigarettes. Always had dried ice cream and crumbs in his grizzly adams beard.

He was so putrid that some of the ladies in chemistry used to start dry-heaving when came in and sat down. I didnt buy the stroke bs, he was just a filthy govt leech. He had taken and failed that gen chem 5 previous times.

It got so bad in the hydrology class that I had to talk to the phD about. He said he was glad that a student had brought it up because he knew about but due sensitivity policies and whatnot, he couldnt act. Students affairs got and involved and the guy was bluntly told to take a fuggin bath and clean up his act.

He smelled about 50% less putrid for apprx 2 weeks. I think we got him to take one shower out that formal complaint.


So bout the typos, im headed down the interstate

There isn't much that smells worse than death, but at least you can usually get away from it.

I reported to NAS Jacksonville in the summer of '77. It didn't take me long to notice that there would be an awful smell in the air occasionally, and then I realized it always showed up on Friday nights. I asked someone who'd been around what the hell that foul odor was, and he told me there was a paper mill across the St. Johns River that was responsible for it. I remarked [unnecessarily] that it was a nauseating odor. The guy looked at me and said "you shoulda been around here in the old days before they started perfuming it." I'm pretty sure the look on my face was priceless.

I lived in an apartment in Fort Worth in the late 90s with two dogs (best ever!). There was a large vacant field across the road where I would take them several times a day to run a bit and take care of their business. One night---in fact, it was Memorial Day 1998, my two hoodlums cornered and CAUGHT a skunk out in that field. I bathed them in tomato juice and distilled white vinegar out on the balcony that night. Over the following weeks, I could smell skunk before I even opened the front door of the apartment when I'd come home from work. They still smelled like skunk when Labor Day came. Good thing skunk doesn't really bother me much.

I was the first on scene to a report of a parked car in a far off the road campsite with a hose from the exhaust into the trunk. When I rolled up to the site he’d been reported missing for 3 weeks! Couldn’t even see into the car there was so much stuff caked to the inside of the windows. While waiting for the Coroner, the evidence tech and I made our way around the car looking for any signs of foul play. When we hit the downwind side, we both looked at each other and almost lost our dinner! The sick part was once the Coroner arrived and opened the door, they didn’t even hesitate! I’ve been to more than my share of dead body calls, but that was the worst smell I’ve ever inhaled. I will never forget it and don’t want to ever experience it again!!!

Maybe I’m a wuss, but I don’t care!

Elk Country

other then a 10-55 during hot weather, 20 lbs of salmon in a camper freezer that had been off 6 days in 85-100 degree temps. sold the camper........ cheap

Yup. Like an advance scouting mission.

Yep.

Dead humans in various stages of decomposition.

Nothing is worse.

I don't know if it was the worst, but it was one of them. The day before I was combining some oats over about a mile from my Uncle's house with the old John Deere combine. I was roading it home afterwards and saw his Angus Bull, feet-in-the-air-dead over in the adjacent pasture, several hundred yards from Uncle's house. I put up the combine and went home. Next day, I roaded the Case 930 over to put up Uncle's blade that I'd borrowed to blade the driveway to Dad's house. I was probably early twenties and this was probably 1982 or so. So I drop the blade off behind Uncle's defunct hog house in a lot where a bunch of equipment was. I smelled this awful stench. It even made me light-headed. I looked on the ground and there was this trail of black fluid. Didn't really look like blood. I followed it over a little ways in the lot and there was the bull, all bloated up. I have a very strong fluid but I was about sick. I went over and went to put the top arm of the three-point in its hanger which was spring steel and needed a pretty good push to get it in. I slammed my finger in it and it hurt like hell. I got on home and was about half sick from the pain and I guess, the stench. My fingernail went black and a few days later I had to heat a needle up and stick it in the nail to drain the black blood out. Fingernail peeled off after much pain and when it grew back didn't look right. It still looks effed up and reminds me of that day.

Later I told my Uncle about it and asked what killed his bull. He said he didn't know but it had been mutilated. No blood around it, just the weird fluid that didn't really look like blood. Stench that was worse than any dead animal. Surgical precision genital removal, tail removal and strip between the ears and ears removed. Neighbor said it was a Satanic cult. Weird how my Uncle and Aunt never heard anything even though their house wasn't far away.

Worst I've ever smelled was a stink bait I hung in a tree close to my bear baiting site. The bait itself was Hostess pastries (ding dongs, cupcakes, fruit pies, etc), but the stink bait was a 5 gallon bucket of carp, freezer burned meat, elk trimmings that didn't go into burger or sausage and stuff like that. It sat in that bucket with the lid on tight for almost 4 months out behind the garage. To hang it, I had to pry the lid off, pour the contents into a pillow case, tie the pillow case with wire, then tie on a rope that I slung up over an aspen branch and hoisted the pillow case up about 15 feet off the ground. Got some of that s#%t on my boots and ended up throwing them away. The bait site was in a saddle near the ridge top and the winds carried that stink north and south for miles. The smell was so bad, I doubt there were any hunters within 2 drainages of my site. Ended up killing a boar that went close to 500 pounds and had a skull that measured 20 3/16". At the time it was the #7 all time archery kill in Utah. The other stinkiest smell was a 23,000 plant marijuana grow on Forest Service property that my task force team discovered when I was working as a narcotics officer. When that stuff is green and growing, if it's high grade, it stinks to high heaven. Arrested 5 illegal Mexicans who were managing the grow site, then pulled and air lifted all 23,000 plants and had the Forest Service come in with their accelerants and torch the whole pile. That stuff burned for almost 2 days!!! Didn't set it afire until the wind was blowing up the canyon away from town or everyone would've been high.....

Moldy broccoli, the smell would truly knock the scabs off a buzzard's butt. Followed closely by the carcass of a Thanksgiving turkey that had become maggot infested, that was so nasty it was all I could do to keep from barfing.

I rode pens for a couple years in a feedlot in eastern CO many moons ago. Slicing open grapefruit sized abscesses were pretty nasty.

I lost a freezer with an antelope and a couple of turkeys in it once, that was bad juju too.

There was a bunch of cases of animal mutilation in the 70's.

I had several I remember in our local area in the west Texas area I grew up in.

Here's a couple of links.

https://vault.fbi.gov/Animal%20Mutilation