‘The Wendy house burnt down': My 16th birthday party from hell

Telegraph

08-07-2025

'F---, it's getting crazy now!' says a wide-eyed partygoer as a car goes up in flames in the Netflix documentary Trainwreck: The Real Project X. It's a parent's worst nightmare: a girl posts a 16th birthday party invitation on Facebook, which subsequently goes viral, and thousands of drunkards turn up at the front door. I should know – because, at the same age, I also thought it would be a good idea to publicly advertise my party on Facebook. Let's just say my parents, who arrived home from a trip to the Yorkshire coast to find our belongings stolen and the Wendy house ablaze in the garden, weren't best pleased.
The Real Project X tells the story of Merthe Weusthuis, a middle-class Dutch girl who, back in 2012, made a Facebook event for her birthday celebrations in the wealthy small town of Haren, near Groningen. She expected that only her friends would see the invite, but she'd inadvertently made the event public. More than 300,000 revellers clicked 'going'. Her parents desperately tried to cancel the event, but 4,000 drunk teenagers descended, and when they realised there was no party to attend, a riot ensued. It was even reported in the Telegraph at the time.
'Posh' Haren, we're told, was transformed from an idyllic neighbourhood to a war zone: cars were flipped and set on fire; protective fences erected by police were pulled down and trampled on; local shops had their windows smashed and contents looted. Grainy footage from the event – who knew cameras in 2012 would look so ancient less than two decades on? – shows young people chanting and downing alcohol, dancing and kissing in the street.
In the film (which follows the Trainwreck strand's equally shocking series' about an infamous ' poop cruise ' and the violence that engulfed Woodstock '99), Merthe herself reflects on how, as a teenager, all she wanted was to be popular, but how the infamy gained by the event caused her to move away from her hometown for good. It made her a laughing stock among fellow Dutch people and her family pariahs, while the town's mayor at the time, Rob Bats, was forced to resign (he refused to appear in the documentary).
Of course, teenagers are prone to making stupid decisions. Take the time I pierced my friend's lip with a rusty earring in the school bathroom before a Paramore concert, aged 14, or when I thought it would be fun to dye half of my hair pink.
But top of the 'I can't believe I did that' low points is when I chose to make the Facebook event for my 16th birthday party – a party my parents had no clue I was hosting – at my very average-sized house, 'public'. The original guest list had included around 80 school friends – out of the 250 total people in my year group – but, in a fit of teenage girl anxiety that not enough people would show up and I'd be branded a loser for eternity, I opted for the 'public' invitation. Spoiler: a lot more people showed up. My parents' sheer fury the day after the party still gives me the shivers today, 13 years on.
The documentary's title is a reference to Project X, Nima Nourizadeh's hit 2012 comedy about a house party in suburban California that gets wildly out of control: supercars are driven into swimming pools, ecstasy is hidden in garden gnomes, floors cave in. The film was released just a month before my 16th birthday and instantly became a word-of-mouth phenomenon between my friends and I.
We had already hungrily consumed chaotic teen dramas such as Skins and 90210, which focused on beautiful teenagers attending legendarily messy parties – complete with limitless drink and drugs – and held them up as the barometer of Cool. Unlike our boring, sober successors Gen Z, nothing was more important to my generation than partying – and the wilder, the better.
My party came about after my parents left me alone for the weekend. I was armed with a few crates of Strongbow and Carling, bought from a dodgy corner shop by a slightly older friend whose tattoos meant he had no trouble getting served, and the (false) belief the adults would never find out; social media hadn't yet become so all-encompassing or instant. An iPod was set up to blast out cheesy music – Drake, Arctic Monkeys and Kid Cudi probably featured heavily – and, if my memory serves me, I was wearing a black sequin skirt paired with a 'statement' necklace. It's all so very, tragically millennial.
The first hour or so of fun quickly gave way to disaster, however, when way more people showed up than I had expected. Every room was full, there were so many people climbing the apple tree in the garden that it began to subside, and one friend quickly became an ex-friend when they were caught doing stuff in my little brother's Bob the Builder-themed bed. In the kitchen, meanwhile, some sneaky sod had stuffed a potato with metal kitchen utensils and then popped it into the microwave. Who said British teenagers can't be inventive?
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A post shared by Merthe Marije Weusthuis (@mertheweusthuis)
Partly due to my quest to have The Best Party Ever (and partly due to the cheap cider I'd spent all night guzzling through a beer bong), I don't remember feeling stressed until a friend ran in shouting that the springs of the outdoor trampoline had been pulled out. Then came a broken TV in the living room, reduced to a spluttering, fuzzy mess after someone poured washing up liquid into the air vents at the top.
The nightmare scenarios kept coming: some boys I didn't know were heard saying they were going to 'raise' (slang for steal) at the party and raise they did – I woke up the day after to find I no longer owned an iPod, Nintendo DS or Wii.
My sore head wasn't helped when I spotted my little sister's Wendy house in the corner of the garden, partly on fire and with its plastic windows kicked through. Even furious neighbours couldn't save me, because my parents' detached house didn't have any in the immediate vicinity; the only adult I remember marching up the drive was a weird stranger who offered to buy us more booze. Luckily, although my friends and I were stupid enough to publicly broadcast my address on Facebook, we weren't naive when it came to creeps, and he was swiftly ejected.
When my parents arrived home, my feeble attempts to clean up were immediately sussed out and I was told to 'get out!' As an angsty 16-year-old girl desperate for some drama in her life, I took this literally and packed a bag to move into a friend's father's outhouse for a few days; ignoring all the calls my poor mum was making begging for me to come back.
So, if you're looking to put the fear of god into your children to stop them ever throwing a wild party – damaging your lovely cream carpets and embarrassing you in front of Linda from next door in the process – then switch on Netflix and let the horror unfold. Or if, like me, you still cringe at the memory of how hopelessly silly you were at 16, watch it through your fingers while vowing to never hold a party again.