The Baby Carriage Law That Never Was

The internet loves a good weird law, and West Virginia's supposed "only babies can ride in a baby carriage" statute is a perfect example. It sounds absurd enough to be true—the kind of oddly specific regulation that makes you wonder what incident prompted it. There's just one problem: this law doesn't actually exist.

Despite appearing on numerous "weird laws" listicles across the internet, no verifiable statute in the West Virginia Code restricts baby carriage passengers to actual babies. Searches of official legislative databases turn up plenty of child safety regulations—car seat requirements, booster seat laws, vehicle passenger restrictions—but nothing about who can ride in a stroller on a sidewalk.

The Anatomy of a Fake Law

So how do these phantom statutes spread? Weird law websites rarely cite actual statute numbers, making them impossible to verify. They get copied from site to site, each repetition adding a veneer of credibility. What starts as a joke or misunderstanding becomes "fact" through sheer repetition.

The West Virginia baby carriage law checks all the boxes of a classic fake statute:

• Oddly specific and seemingly pointless
• No citation to actual legal code
• Appears on multiple sites, but always without sources
• Can't be found in official state legislative databases

When Baby Carriages Were Actually Banned

Ironically, there were real laws about baby carriages—just not this one. When prams first appeared in the late 1800s, several jurisdictions banned them from public footpaths entirely. Women were actually prosecuted for pushing their babies on sidewalks because the carriages were treated like vehicles.

Eventually, authorities decided that mothers with strollers didn't pose enough safety risk to warrant prosecution, and these bans faded away. But imagine the outcry today if someone tried to ticket a parent for using a stroller on a sidewalk.

Why We Believe Weird Laws

These viral "weird laws" persist because they're entertaining and just plausible enough. Government bureaucracy can produce genuinely bizarre regulations, so we're primed to believe that somewhere, somehow, a legislator actually debated stroller passenger requirements.

The reality is more mundane: West Virginia, like most states, has sensible child safety laws focused on car seats and vehicle passengers. No lawmaker has wasted time legislating who can ride in a stroller, because it's never been a problem that needed solving.

Next time you see a "weird law" claim online, ask yourself: where's the statute number? If the answer is nowhere, you're probably looking at internet folklore, not actual legislation. West Virginia's baby carriage law is just one of countless examples—memorable, shareable, and completely made up.