A smell descended on campus last week. Students described the smell as “fishy”, “wet mildew”, “wet dog”, “an old wet towel”, “a musty undertone”, and “like a cross between something decomposing and those sheep trucks that go past campus on SH1.”
All agreed it smelled gross. Critic first noticed the smell on Wednesday morning, walking into the East entrance of the Link. The smell was still outside the Link on Thursday morning, but moved around to the front entrance of Te Tumu (North of Castle) in the afternoon.
Critic wanted to know what it was, so we asked the University. While investigating the smell later in the afternoon, we saw members of the University Comms team also investigating the smell. Someone said “it made me dry-retch.”
Another student said “it’s not as gross as you’re making it out to be.”
Dushanka, a student, thought she had “stepped on something” the first time she smelled it. My friends were like “‘IT’S THE LEAVES’, but I do not get the smell anywhere else on campus so I doubt it,” she said. “Maybe I am just a dumb Aucklander but I have also never smelled this particular smell before.”
Several theories were discussed regarding the smell.
- Cum tree: Some trees just smell like cum. Maybe this was one of them? Critic disproved this hypothesis because a) the smell wasn’t really like cum, and b) the tree was not the correct kind of tree to produce a cum smell.
- Piles of rotting leaves: If it wasn’t a cum tree, maybe it was leaves rotting on the ground. This sounds logical, but as Dushanka pointed out, that would make the whole of campus smelly rather than just the area outside Castle.
- The drains around campus: This is currently the number one theory and no one has disproved it.
- Conspiracy: On the day we started reporting on this, Google had a tree as its symbol. Coincidence? I think not.
“Our Property Services Division is investigating the cause of the smell,” said a spokesperson for the University of Otago.