Since I stopped smoking, which was in 2009, I have been smelling scents, smells and odors that aren’t there. I’m living in a new house (the house is an old house. My living in a new place makes the house a new house.) First I was smelling the odor of Ajax (the cleanser), but there was no Ajax in the house. Recently I have been smelling a strong cheesy smell throughout the house. These smells are disturbing, esp since there isn’t any evidence of them being real.
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I got some advice on this one that helped me judge…
If the small follows you outside or you still smell it as you walk around the house… or in the shower… it’s most likely an olfactory hallucination.
If the smell stays in one area… it could be a scent on the breeze… or like the ajax… maybe a person before you cleaned a lot with ajax and some of the residual is still able to be smelled.
As far as the strong cheese smell… I was living in a section 8 housing and one of the tenants put lumps of cheese in the heater vent because he was mad about not having his own parking spot.
That might be something you need to find and clean. Good luck.
Congratulations on the new place… I always like the idea of moving. Hate doing it… but love the idea.
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I get nasal hallucinations on a regular basis. an old friend is giving them too them. i'll notice a strong overpowering oder of stinky socks, dirty diapers, or cheese, and odors like that, then I will sniff with my real nose and smell nothing. I think it has something to do with the olfactory bulb. sometimes I think I would like to have it cut out. My friend Dominique(I call him butt munch or butt truck) can give me nasal hallucination anytime he wants to. They are very annoying and even dangerous. If my nasal hallucinations are given to any of the people around me, they are bound to have an outraged response to them thinking they are real smells.Thanks SurprisedJ!
I am pretty good at being scientific about symptoms. Still I will usually go for the psychiatric explanation of some “unusual” sense perception rather than the “normal” one. The odors follow me around throughout the house. I get them in my car and at home at my old house. I deduce “hallucination”. It’s more stylish for me to spot my sense perceptions as pathological rather than normal. It gives me some cachet. At the very least, I have some identity.
Big move for me-I’ve been doing this since Sep. Moving for financial reasons.
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Other people can’t smell your hallucinations. They are yours.
What is an olfactory “bulb”?
i smell cigarettes and perfume and blokey aftershave…
take care 
I tend smell heavy medical cream that no one in the house used, by my grandfather on my dad’s side was known to use. I’d smell only briefly, from time to time, long after he died in 2007. It was odd because he had never been to the house we lived in, died in another state all together…but still the smell would come. I wasn’t frightened or bothered by the smell, just slightly annoyed because sometimes I’d be the only one who could smell it. Sometimes I wonder if it was him just checking up on us.
My dad’s family is large, but I felt a bit of a connection with my grandpa, he didn’t talk much, like me we’d just sit there together watching TV and it was a nice time with him. I never cared for the shows he watched (mostly MAS*H or stuff like that, I just liked sitting with him…I never felt obligated to try and spark up a conversation or anything.
I haven’t smelled it in a while, not since we moved. But I will smell some strange things from time to time I just think they’re scents coming from outside. We have very thin windows so I tend to just ignore things I can’t place when it comes to sounds or smells, and not to trying to be rude but we have foreigners both across the hall from us and above us and they can cook some things that smell pretty odd to me at times. Sometimes I don’t even bother trying to figure out what it is I’m smelling, and most of the time I probably don’t want to know.
Sometimes ignorance can be bliss.
the other night I thought I saw dog poop on my pants and I could smell it too but then when I went into the light there was nothing but I still smelled it.
I hate that. I don’t have a good sense of smell anyway after 3 pack a day smoker Dad and all kind of wood/metal working chemicals always permeating the house…
Back in Renaissance, the women wore a little bouquet of flowers around neck to lift up to nose passing something that smelled putrid. I’m sure you can come up with some kind of essential oils or room freshener thing to sniff once in a while. Works for me to change scents when I do have sense of smell & hate it.
@Stillperkin I heard there is some new pheromone medicine that is coming out for social anxiety!
I’m leaving the site now, finding it hard to believe any of this.
Try smelling the foul Jersey air sometime while passing through there or if you live there.