I once drove past an industrial pig farm in central Illinois. Even with the windows up it was torture.

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  2. Couple week/month old dead animals including at least one skunk is up there I’d say

  3. A rendering plant in South Texas. Granted it was way out but is was on the road to a popular beach. 60 years later and I still remember it.

  9. Burning hair, fingernails, and flesh. You can find that scent anywhere by being a dumbass who accidentally lit themselves on fire.

  10. There is a weird smell in a local supermarket that I am the only one I know that can smell it, and it is so bad that if I ever go in there, I have to breathe through my mouth, otherwise I will get a headache. I don’t know what it smells like, but it makes me think of cancer.

  12. There was some manure processing facility north of Amarillo, Texas. It was pretty awful.

  13. Not sure if it’s skunks, or the oil refinery between Toledo and Detroit

  14. I took environmental biology in college. We visited a waste water treatment facility. If you never smell hundreds of thousands of gallons of poo water, be thankful.

  16. Pig farms smell like money. Commercial grease traps smell wayyyyyy worse.

  17. I worked in a grocery store. Had to clean out a shopvac in the back one time. It was the worst smell I have ever smelt. It was near scalding hot water and a slurry of old rotting nasty things that would end up in a shopvac in a grocery store with a butcher in it. It was horrendous. The steaming of it was vile.

  19. Hereford, Texas. The beef capital of the United States. (They boast it’s the beef capitol of the world) Over 1 million cows and 15,000 people. Miles and miles of slaughterhouses and “farms” of millions of cows packed in cages outside factories. Like an astronomical amount of cows in the hot desert. Took a detour off the highway on a cross country road trip.

    I had the windows open and my eyes were watering. Windows closed was worse. My clothes in my trunk in a suitcase had to be washed again because they held onto the smell. Like cow shit and rotting meat with a mix of what a McDonald’s dumpster smells like. Just from driving through.

    Apparently they have “shust” storms and a ton of kids have severe asthma that live there. What’s “shust” you ask? Cows shit dried up into dust.

    Here’s some info on how insane it is: https://www.texasobserver.org/cafos-panhandle-tceq/

  22. A dead, bloated and rotting Right Whale. You could smell it from a couple of miles away. My clothes, after being around it for an hour or so, had to be thrown away as the foul odor would not come out.

    On a smaller scale but equally foul was a morbidly obese man that had died in his blazing hot, steamy, attic in the summer in Southern Georgia. No one noticed until the smell got so bad it was obvious something was wrong. He had swollen up so bad they had to cut a hole in the roof to try to remove the body. When they opened the hole the stench that billowed out was of epic proportions. Then, as they tried to lift the corpse it fell apart into a gelatinous mess. Even some of the emergency folks doing the lifting started throwing up.

  24. Burnt whale oil. They used to use it in some Oldsmobile differentials, and it’s horrible and sticks to your skin for days.

  25. I used to work for a sanitation company that cleaned out septic tanks. You’d think that any of the pits of literal human feces would be the worst thing I’ve ever smelled. You’d be wrong.

    The absolute **worst** thing I’ve ever had the unfortunate pleasure of having seared into my nostrils was the outdoor grease tank at a Dunkin Donuts in Morgantown, WV. The one next to Bass Pro Shop. They hadn’t had it cleaned out in over a year or two when we did it. It smelled like if you condensed rotting carcasses, ammonia, and gym clothes that haven’t been washed in a year into a thick slurry that stuck to everything it touched and *would not* come off. It hardened in some spots and I had to break up chunks with a big iron bar, a lot of which resulted in it splashing on my coat and pants. Smelled it the rest of my 12 hour shift.

    It was so much worse than any septic tank I cleaned before or after that, and I had cleaned out one at a retirement home. I had to burn the clothes I was wearing that day. Grease tanks were always worse than septic, but that was far and above the worst one.

  26. I have a strong stomach. My wife gets sick when encountering vomit. So I get to deal with that stuff. And I work for a sewer district so I encounter a lot of gross stuff there. No problem.

    The worst smell that I’ve encountered is when my dogs are shit and then barfed it back up. The combination of stomach acid and digesting feces was just too much for me. It’s like the bad smell of each was multiplied by the other.

  29. Not worse, but relived for the reduction: The Aroma of Tacoma. Pulp mills had a smell to them.

  30. I work in health care. I’ve changed colostomy bags, dealt with C.Dif and MRSA stool.

    All that shit is the nastiest shit I’ve ever smelled. My nostrils get stained afterwords.

  31. When I was a biochemist, I had to synthesize thioacetone for an experiment. I could tell from the chemical name that it was going to smell bad, and somewhat braced myself for that.

    But I didn’t expect it to be *that* bad. Holy balls that’s a smell that stays in your brain for life.

  34. I did some work for a time at a Waste-To-Energy plant.

    Outside, it didn’t smell like much at all. Inside, around the storage pit and furnace throats, the smell of thousands of tons of garbage is a physical force. *Especially* near the furnace throats.

    What actually surprised me is how quickly it became tolerable.

  35. Eastern Colorado is pretty rough. Smells like turd until you hit Aurora. If you don’t count farms, paper mills in western Washington are definitely another top dog.

  36. Emptying out my apartment-sized storage unit in New Orleans about eighty days after Katrina made landfall. My furniture and such had been in there all summer, and I had returned to the city just in time to evacuate again.

    So when I got back to my storage unit, it had been flooded and then that had subsided months ago. And meanwhile it sat in humid, stagnant air, without electricity and therefore nothing to mitigate the continuing blast of end of summer heat followed by two months of damp festering that never quite allowed a crust to form as everything baked.

    The only thing I could salvage from that unit was a set of free weights.

  37. Found a dead, rotting, baby humpback whale that had been washed up on shore, on the hottest day of the summer with oil oozing out of the whale. It was very unpleasant

  38. Human decomposition.

    I have done a lot of work with law enforcement. As such, I have been there for dead body calls.

    That is a smell you cannot forget. Ever.

  39. Probably not what you’re looking for answer-wise… but it was a truly horrific smell and it did happen in the US.

    One year when I was young (I wanna say 8 or so) my mom bought a turkey for Thanksgiving and started defrosting it in the oven (turned off). But then we somehow got invited(?) to someone else’s house for Thanksgiving or something so we left and ate there. Then, somehow (don’t even ask me how) my mom *forgot about the turkey.*

    A week or so later she opened the oven to find… the raw turkey. Or the sludge that had formerly been the raw turkey. Then when she tried to take it out to throw it away it sort of exploded a little bit of rotten turkey sludge around the kitchen.

    It was not a fun time.

  40. We were driving around once we came apon this smell we could only discribe as as someone did a burn out on a skunk.

    Burning rubber and skunk

  41. sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Philly. lady was eating durian in the back room.

  42. High school football Lockerroom. A mix stale BO and a variety of Axe body sprays

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