Not quite the same thing, but years ago I was a developer working on an app for Clerks of Court in the one state that doesn't share the same legal basis as the other 49 states (should make it easy to guess which state). One day I got assigned a bug ticket that said the "State" dropdown in the app had 519 entries. This was of course a few too many, so I took a look at the STATES table in the database, which as expected contained the two-letter abbreviations for all 50 states but then a whole bunch of other shit after than, including all the states fully spelled out and often misspelled many times as well (there were more than 20 different spellings of Louisiana, for example), and then a bunch of country names.

It turned out that one of my coworkers had been assigned the task of including the state's standard marriage license form in the application. This form had sections labeled "State" for the bride and groom, but since the victims (or whatever people getting married are called legally) were often from out of state or even from other countries, clerks would just write in whatever in this part of the form. My coworker was a fanatic about normalized databases, so rather than just allowing these fields to be plain text, he foreign-keyed them into the pre-existing STATES table and added code that added new entries to this table whenever users typed something new into the fields. It never once occurred to him that this table might have been utilized in other parts of the app.

How this table grew to 519 rows before anyone logged a complaint about it is beyond me.