Does paint/stain really go bad and turn chunky-ish after a while?

[joe]

Where I live, there is this little cubby in this persons fence where there is a green electrical box and an open "transparent stain" bucket.
My friends use to hang out over there and sit on the bucket. One day (about a week ago), they noticed a bad smell coming from the bucket. So they went home, grabbed a screwdriver, and popped it open. They said that the smell was so bad, that one of them puked.
What it looked like to me (they showed it to me the next day) was decaying flesh inside the bucket. Flies were everywhere on it, and it smelled terrible.
We decided not to do anything about it, because their fingerprints were all over it, and they didn't want to call the cops.
I told my dad about it, and he came out and looked at it. He told me it was just some kind of stain/paint, and when it gets old, it looks like that.

And finally today, I went back over there, and decided to call the cops.
The cops came, and picked up the bucket and also told me it was stain or paint. WTF?!

[dali333]

if the paint or stain was contaminated or improperly sealed, its likely mold grew in there. mold can look pretttty funk-ay when its growing in a paint can.