At first we thought someone died in our apartment building, so we called the cops. We figured out that the smell was coming from the basement and creeping up through the staircase in our front hallway... of course we couldn't get in touch with the janitor to let us into the basement when the cops were around (it was night time). The police verified that, yes, it smelled like a dead body. Great, we're thinking that there's a corpse in our basement. The next morning, the management company says the maintenance guys looked everywhere and couldn't find anything, that it's probably a dead rat in the wall and we just have to wait for the smell to go away. We've got a towel underneath our door to stop the occasional waft of death coming in from the hallway. Merry fucking whatever.

Anybody else have to deal with this before?

This is why you should never use poison to kill rats - a lesson I learned a long time ago (I didn't poison them, but had to live with the smell). They get really sick and go off to their private places to die.

Traps - quick and violent death - are the way to go.

John W. wrote:Great, we're thinking that there's a corpse in our basement.

I am a bad and horrible person for LAUGHING OUT LOUD when I read this.

Oh you should've heard them.

They kept saying over and over:

'Oh yeah, that definitely smells like a dead body.'

Thanks guys... guys? Oh, you're off to get dinner, okay.

when we moved into our new renovated house in the baltimore ghetto, there was definitely something dead under the island in the kitchen. fortunately, keeping the cabinet door to the island shut helped immensely. i considered drilling a hole and sticking an industrial vacuum cleaner in the hole to suck out the corpse of whatever was in there, but in 2-3 weeks the smell was gone.

i feel for you. the vermin corpse smell is not pleasant.

I've had this situation twice, sort of. First time, the rat ate the poison and went out looking for water (the stuff is supposed to make 'em thirsty so they go looking for a pond or some shit) and he went off and died.

Second time, died in my wall.

It was summer.

It was summer in Texas.

Ohhh dude.

I am so sorry to hear you had to deal with that.

This is why the cat is the best method of rodent extermination. They will bring the corpse right to you as a gift.

Thankfully I have never received this gift, but it is Christmas.

One summer at my old house in Houston, a possum died under the house. Directly under my little cramped bathroom. It was a pretty old house and obviously not a very air-tight floor. We didn't know what it was at first. It was the most fuck-all foul shit you could ever have to endure, especially when you were closed up in the non-ventilated room taking a steamy beer shit early in the morning. There was no way to get under there and remove the possum, the bathroom was in the middle of the house which was raised maybe a foot off the ground. I think it took more than a month for the unique odor to finally wear off, although it went through several signature smells while going through different levels of decay. Each one sweeter than the one before, as you might imagine.

This happened at my high school all the time in late spring.

Buy me a beer or two and I will tell you a story of the week of carnage, which caps off with me having to remove a raccoon carcass from underneath my 2x4 deck in Austin and placing the body into two separate garbage bags.