If You Smell Something Fishy, Maybe it’s Nessie

by Kevin Candela

There’s a ghost in the Lemp Mansion in St. Louis that can produce a terrible sewer-like smell. It’s been depicted clearly on the popular TV show Ghost Hunters. Too bad they couldn’t have bottled the air and had it tested. Maybe next time, GH folks? Or anyone else who wants to check out that locale, where I’ve had dinner but (as usual) picked up on nothing at all. The Ghost Hunters were there in a storm too, meaning that they couldn’t even trust their own senses that night because of the heightened emotional effects of the strobing lightning and cracking thunder. So if they go back, and they DON’T make a plan to monitor that air, I’ll be a bit disappointed.

Smell. You can’t show it on TV. Taste. You can’t depict that either. Of course you don’t hear very often of paranormal flavors at hotspots, so we’ll stick to smell/olfactory oddities for the purposes of this blog.

What other supernatural weirdness can be smelled? Well, an obvious one is Bigfoot/Sasquatch/STINK Ape. Many terrestrial cryptids apparently don’t go in for hygiene, at least not as we know it. Many sightings of such creatures include odor factors. I would imagine most land creatures give off an odor of some kind, the question being how strong?

UFOs smell. Sometimes, anyway. Gotta expect that with drive systems, exhaust, physical distortions, singeing of land and vegetation, etc. I would imagine without deep research that ozone is the most commonly detected vaporous odor.

Demons smell. Sulphur is the usual first reference odor, but there’s more than just that. Does that mean they come from within the earth itself and bring traces of its physical self along with them? I gotta figure the marine cryptids give off odors, but that’s not a big part of Nessie or Ogopogo reports as far as I know. Maybe that’s because they smell a lot like their locales, so it’s not noticeable. One of my very favorite movies is 1944’s The Uninvited. In that one, the signature smell of one ghost is her scent of jasmine. Critical to the plot, really, and it required no stunt work at all (as opposed to, say, that time-spoiled flower scene in that upstairs music room with all the windows). So even that long ago, smell was being recognized as a link to paranormal doings—at least to the point of invading popular culture.

In summary, maybe this is where we get a couple of common phrases. “I smell something funny” has come to suggest things more along the line of human treachery than ghosts, Bigfoot, etc., but that doesn’t mean it’s not perfectly apt for the supernatural. Most of it seems to have some olfactory factor, which means IF you happen to smell something odd and you’re so inclined, you might want to perk up the rest of your senses because you might just be in the presence of something mysterious.

And if that mystery isn’t your bag, why are you reading this?