It is a common mushroom in Europe and North America, where it occurs in habitats rich in wood debris such as forests and mulched gardens.

In older fungi the slime is eventually removed, exposing a bare yellowish pitted and ridged (reticulate) surface.

Stinkhorns instead produce a sticky spore mass on their tip which has a sharp, sickly-sweet odor of carrion to attract flies and other insects.

[14] The mature fruiting bodies can be smelled from a considerable distance in the woods, and at close quarters most people find the cloying stink extremely repulsive.

[16] The study also showed that beetles (Oeceoptoma thoracica and Meligethes viridescens) are attracted to the fungus, but seem to have less of a role in spore dispersal as they tend to feed on the hyphal tissue of the fruiting body.

The laxative effect of the gleba reduces the distance from the fruiting body to where the spores are deposited, ensuring the continued production of high densities of stinkhorns.

[18] The common stinkhorn can be found throughout much of Europe and North America, and it has also been collected in Asia (including China,[21] Taiwan,[22] and India[23]), Costa Rica,[24] Iceland,[25] Tanzania,[26] and southeast Australia.

[10] In 1777, the reverend John Lightfoot wrote that the people of Thuringia called the unopened stinkhorns "ghost's or daemon's eggs" and dried and powdered them before mixing them in spirits as an aphrodisiac.

At the end of the day's sport, the catch was brought back and burnt in the deepest secrecy on the drawing-room fire, with the door locked; because of the morals of the maids.

[34] In Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), the psychologist Dr. Krokowski gives a lecture on the Phallus impudicus: And Dr. Krokowski had spoken about one fungus, famous since classical antiquity for its form and the powers ascribed to it – a morel, its Latin name ending in the adjective impudicus, its form reminiscent of love, and its odor, of death.

For the stench given off by the impudicus was strikingly like that of a decaying corpse, the odor coming from greenish, viscous slime that carried its spores and dripped from the bell-shaped cap.

[35]In Danilo Kiš's novel Garden, Ashes the protagonist's father Eduard Schaum provokes the suspicions of the local residents and authorities through his mad wandering and sermonizing in the forests:The story went round, and was preached from the pulpit, that his iron-tipped cane possessed magical powers, that trees withered like grass whenever he walked in the Count's forest, that his spit produced poisonous mushrooms --Ithyphalus impudicus--that grew under the guise of edible, cultivated varieties.