Ten 'Weird Laws' Still on the Books, Fact-Checked

Nearly every weird-law list says Alabama makes it illegal to carry an ice cream cone in your back pocket. The usual backstory is that horse thieves once used a cone to lure horses away, so the animal technically followed them by choice and no one could be charged with theft.

It is a great story with no statute behind it. Alabama's criminal code, Title 13A, covers theft, trespass and public nuisances without a word about ice cream. A review by the legal explainer site LegalClarity found no verifiable record of the law in the Alabama Code, and none of the lists that repeat it cite a section number. The horse-luring explanation has never been tied to any real case or code section; it reads like a backstory invented to make the rule sound plausible.

The photographer Olivia Locher, who spent years staging pictures of supposedly real weird laws, told PBS NewsHour that she came to believe the cone rule had once been on the books in Kentucky rather than Alabama. We could not find that statute either. What we can say with confidence is that no current Alabama law forbids a back-pocket cone, and anyone who tries it faces nothing worse than a sticky pair of jeans.

According to countless lists, a pickle can only legally be sold as a pickle in Connecticut if it bounces. It sounds too silly to be real, and it is not real. But unlike most fake laws, this one has a traceable origin.

In 1948, the Hartford Courant reported on two pickle packers charged with selling pickles unfit to eat. Frederick Holbrook, the state's food and drug commissioner, offered a homespun quality test: drop a pickle about a foot, and if it does not bounce, it is no good. The packers were charged under the state's ordinary food adulteration law, not under any pickle statute. Somewhere along the way, the commissioner's rule of thumb turned into a law in the retelling.

NBC Connecticut's investigative team asked the state directly. Consumer Protection Commissioner Bryan Cafferelli said no such law exists. No Connecticut statute mentions pickles by name; pickled vegetables are covered by the general food, drug and cosmetic rules on adulterated food. The reporters also tested the idea by dropping pickles at a Hartford ballpark from heights up to about 15 feet. Most survived the drop, but a UConn Extension expert explained that a well-preserved pickle is simply firm and crunchy, and probably will not bounce at all.

This one comes with its own legend. Sometime in the 1920s, the story goes, a donkey in Kingman, Arizona, fell asleep in an old bathtub, a flood swept it away, and the townspeople spent so much effort rescuing it that the town banned donkeys from sleeping in bathtubs. Later versions upgrade it to a statewide law.

No one has ever produced the text. A review by LegalClarity found no matching ordinance in Kingman's municipal code or anywhere in Arizona law. The Phoenix New Times, which went through ten famous Arizona dumb laws, rated the donkey rule as not a law and noted that the origin story is just that, a story. It shares a list with other Arizona inventions such as a supposed crime of refusing someone a glass of water, which the same paper called the state's biggest legal urban legend.

The donkey tale has a structure common to fake laws: a specific town, a vague decade, and a funny incident that supposedly forced lawmakers' hands. That is the tell. Real ordinances leave paper trails in council minutes and municipal codes. This one has only been passed around in joke books and websites, and no date, council vote or code section has ever been attached to it.

One of the most widely shared weird laws claims that in Texas, anyone planning a crime must give the victim 24 hours' notice, either in writing or out loud. It turns up on trivia sites and even on law firm blogs, usually presented as a law still in effect.

No such law exists, and it would make no sense if it did. Criminal statutes define offenses and penalties; they do not set up a courtesy notice system for offenders. The claim circulates on law firm blogs and trivia sites, typically with no statute number attached, and lists that present it as real cite nothing. When the NPR quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! put it to actor and Texas native Matthew McConaughey, he correctly flagged it as fake.

Texas does have a real advance-notice law, just not for criminals. On the same show, the panel confirmed that Texas requires advance public notice, published in newspapers weeks ahead of time, before anyone conducts weather modification such as cloud seeding. It is an actual notice requirement, just for rainmakers rather than robbers. The lesson for readers: when a weird law sounds like a punch line and nobody cites a code section, it is almost always a punch line.