TIFU: I thought the smell in my kitchen was from my fridge.

TW: Death

Obligatory on mobile, and this happened a few days ago.

So I live in a triplex with my boyfriend, and the other two units are occupied by an elderly man (same floor, entrance to his unit is on the other side of the building), and a guy around my age upstairs.

A few weeks ago, my unit lost power for a few days, resulting in all of our food in the freezer going bad. After coming back from my boyfriend’s parent’s house, we noticed a smell in our kitchen. I just assumed it was the freezer from the meat inside going bad. So I removed everything and scrubbed it out, but the smell remained. It was like this for a week or so, kind of lost track of how long, but I just assumed that it was me needing to air out the freezer more.

A few days ago, my upstairs neighbor knocked on my door asking if I could smell the ungodly smell he had in his unit. Not connecting that I had a smell in my fridge, I said no. He said it had been there for a few days and he could not get rid of it.

The next day, he knocked on my door again and asked if I had seen our other housemate recently. The smell was now in every crevice of the property in the 90 degree heat. Sparing the gruesome details, we ended up calling to cops for a checkup because we couldn’t get him to answer the door. Turns out he had been dead for a while, and we were smelling him.

TLDR: Thought my fridge was stinking, turned out to be my neighbor’s corpse in the summer heat.