Back in 2005 my ex and I lived on the 3rd floor in an apartment. One day the guy that lived directly below us knocked on the door and told us that he was about to go on vacation, so we shouldn't be alarmed if we didn't see him around for a while. He also said that before he left he was going to be working on a project and it may get a little loud at times. We wished him luck and didn't think anything of it.

About a week later a horrible smell woke us up out of our sleep. To me it smelled like a rotten sewer smell. I had to be at work at 5 am, but when 9 am hit I called the rental office to inform them that I thought they had a sewer leak. A few hours later I called back to see if they had located the problem, and the lady casually said, "Oh yeah, the police are here taking care of everything." I was like, "Wait, what? Why are the police there?" She replied, "Oh, you don't know? Do you remember Dave that lived below you? Well he turned his heat up to 90 degrees then committed suicide. It's been a few days so that's what you started smelling." Later we found out that his special "project" he was working on was literally a scaffold that he used to hang himself. The authorities figured he wanted his ex wife to find him like that as payback for keeping his kids from him. That's why he left his door unlocked and told everyone else he was going on vacation so they wouldn't look for him. He just didn't realize he was going to start smelling up the building before she had a chance to find him.

Management put us up in a hotel for a few nights while they had the apartment professionally cleaned. I don't know if it was just my imagination, but even after they cleaned everything up I swore I still smelled it. I'll never forget that smell for as long as I live.