It happened recently to one item. Savior's Hide. Reallllly ticks me off on this one. The only D-fact that is glitched, and I laid it out on the bed of my Breezehome house once! Not a container. Ill have to try this trick. I've heard before it works. Care to re-give more explicit instructions?

Oh- red lettering in a container only.
the words stolen, upper right corner of the item, in yr personal inventory

There is a glitch somewhere here, because i have items I know aren't stolen, and they wind up as being marked as such. I haven't figured it out yet, since it hasn't effected gameplay except for the fact that if I drop a stolen item Aela won't pick it up - I have to figure out how to manage her inventory! She has been dismissed once, so now her carry weight is lower.

I have a vague recollection of reading about a stolen item glitch somewhere, or maybe I just conjured it up to fit the situation!

I know if you have your NPC follower pick up a stack of items, they get the stolen flag. Haven't seen that particular issue affect single-stack items like swords though.

Listen here, I have another glitch that is the complete opposite of this one. Every item in the game is in white, and I can no longer steal items, because every item is marked as unstolen.

This is a possibility. I had Fandael as a follower. I used the Alchemists shack as a place to store my stuff until I could get the house in Riften, so the bedside table in the shack held all my extra stuff. Anyway, I got Honeyside and told Fandael to take everything from the shack (nothing was stolen). I went back to my new house and proceeded to take my extra stuff from his inventory and place it in various containers. I noticed some of the items in the containers were red.

Then I placed an item to "decorate" a table it all of a sudden had a red "steal (item)" tag. Confused, I just picked it back up and then Fandael calls me a thief and proceeds to take EVERYTHING from my inventory!!! He even took things that I hadn't placed in a container yet! Nothing was red in my inventory until I placed it in a container.

I knew there were issues with this house, but I thought they were fixed, and maybe this was just a new bug. It sound now that it may be an issue with other houses as well.

Some rooms at inns have containers that are not marked as owned, some do.

Invisible Dawnstar Khajiit caravan merchant chest can be used to remove stolen flags from items. I always use it when items picked up by followers glitch. Just put it in, take it out and voila!