RFC 1951 specifies that the first level of encoding in a block contains HCLEN 3-bit values, which encode the lengths of the next level of Huffman codes. Since these are 3-bit values, it follows that no code for the next level can be longer than 7 bits (111 in binary).
However, there seem to be corner cases which (at least with the "classical" algorithm to build Huffman codes, using a priority queue) apparently generate codes of 8 bits, which can of course not be encoded.
An example I came up with is the following (this represents the 19 possible symbols resulting from the RLE encoding, 0-15 plus 16, 17 and 18):
symbol | frequency
-------+----------
0 | 15
1 | 14
2 | 6
3 | 2
4 | 18
5 | 5
6 | 12
7 | 26
8 | 3
9 | 20
10 | 79
11 | 94
12 | 17
13 | 7
14 | 8
15 | 4
16 | 16
17 | 1
18 | 13
According to various online calculators (eg https://people.ok.ubc.ca/ylucet/DS/Huffman.html), and also building the tree by hand, some symbols in the above table (namely 3 and 17) produce 8-bit long Huffman codes. The resulting tree looks ok to me, with 19 leaf nodes and 18 internal nodes. So, is there a special way to calculate Huffman codes for use in DEFLATE?
Yes. deflate uses length-limited Huffman codes. You need either a modified Huffman algorithm that limits the length, or an algorithm that shortens a Huffman code that has exceeded the length. (zlib does the latter.)
In addition to the code lengths code being limited to seven bits, the literal/length and distance codes are limited to 15 bits. It is not at all uncommon to exceed those limits when applying Huffman's algorithm to sets of frequencies encountered during compression.
Though your example is not a valid or possible set of frequencies for that code. Here is a valid example that results in a 9-bit Huffman code, which would then need to be squashed down to seven bits:
3 0 0 5 5 1 9 31 58 73 59 28 9 1 2 0 6 0 0