I can't say that it was the "worst" but it was definitely up there. We went to see a "corpse plant" blooming at the Houston Museum of Natural Science once. Having never smelled a corpse, I can't make a comparison but it was pretty stinky. Otherwise, I'll give a nod to any potato that falls behind something in the pantry and liquifies eventually. Now THAT'S a bad smell.
It would have to be the house we turned up to housesit for 27 days in Sydney ….( in May ) .we stayed 3 days The fridge had a horrible smell without the rest of the house stench
It's hard to judge between obnoxious smells when they occur years apart. Surely, getting sprayed by a skunk wasn't pleasant, but I'd have to say that a body that had been decomposing in a house for a week or so probably takes the cake on that one. Knowing that it was a decomposing human being factored into it, I suppose.
Tie between two. Skunk sprayed the guy I was with, close range. The other was a broken vial of osmium tetroxide. The first smelled marginally worse but the second scared me more.
A dead animal. Say, a deer you might run across in the woods. That smell seems to linger in your (my) nose, long after you've left the scene. Worse than skunk to me, so a dead skunk might actually smell better.
Decomposing flesh is right at the near top of the smelometer and I really thought it was the worse until some years ago when a cat sat on my chest with its butt just under my nose when it passed gas. Without any doubt, I have never before or since smelled something so fetid, so foul and so absolutely evil that just the memory of it makes me want to toss my cookies.
At a place I once worked, they used caustic chemicals in the manufacturing process, and as a tech it was my job to find out why this chemical wasn't being dispensed. A pump was used but quit working, so I opened the lid containing the chemical , and it threw my head back. It was more than just the smell and was probably damaging if it was inhaled for a long time.
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago called Villa Park. Ovaltine had it's factory there, smack in the middle of town. Once a week they expelled some sort of ... well, I guess you could call it fumes from the chimney that smelled so sickening that people in town would walk down the sidewalk with scarves (or anything they could find) over their noses. I'm trying to find a word to describe the smell but I don't think one exists. Suffice it to say, I've never had a cup of Ovaltine in my life.
When I was 9, my mom took me to Europe to visit relatives. While we were in Paris, I walked into a cheese store. I ran out just as I was about to gag.
Open tiled urination trough as they use in 3rd world nations. Another name for it would be "The Alley" but the pretty tiled effect was supposed to make it an upper class men's room.