Over the weekend, Thessa, a 16-year-old girl in Hamburg, Germany, unintentionally threw a now-legendary party. The teenage girl — an unsuspecting, non-famous person — forgot to mark her birthday invitation as private on her Facebook. This doesn’t really seem like a big deal. Plenty of Facebook events are public. However, the party became one of those things: “Hey, this girl on Facebook is throwing a 16th birthday party. Wouldn’t it be funny if we got thousands of people to show up?” (Like, say, if your college roommate agreed to host the Penn debate team without telling you his plan was to turn the entire dormitory floor into a makeshift rave — equipped with porn screening on the walls and “Piss Blood” written in black-light marker above your bed — and invite half of NYU to come and act like it was normal, until the Penn students demanded a room change. For instance.)
The party prank went viral, and more than 1,500 guests actually showed up to Thessa’s soirée, even after Thessa canceled it last-minute, in fear. Revelers may have expected the target of this semi-harmless prank to embrace it, but things didn’t go down that way: Thessa “went into hiding,” the AP reports, and she was later found “celebrating quietly with her grandparents at an undisclosed location.” Still, that didn’t stop the shindig:
Revelers held up signs asking “Where is Thessa?” others brought birthday presents and homemade cake, there was lots of alcohol and the crowd chanted again and again, “Thessa, celebrating a birthday is not a crime,” — in obvious relation to the massive police presence.
Thessa’s parents had to hire a private security service, eleven people were detained by police, and German firefighters had to extinguish two minors blazes. But even the AP admits it: “The party was a hit.”
