Paint the Town Red

A genuinely real historical event gets the credit for this one, even though the dates don't actually line up. On the night of 6 April 1837, Henry Beresford, the 3rd Marquess of Waterford, went on a drunken rampage through Melton Mowbray with a group of aristocratic friends, smashing windows, assaulting a tollkeeper, and literally painting doors, window shutters, and a tollhouse with red paint. It's a wonderfully well-documented night of vandalism. The trouble is, "paint the town red" doesn't show up in print as an idiom until 1883, roughly 46 years later, and its earliest known appearance is in an American newspaper, not a British one. A real riotous night in Melton Mowbray almost certainly happened. Whether it's actually where the phrase comes from is much harder to prove.