Twitter turns house parties into Project X-inspired free-for-alls

Parents of children who grew up before the mid-90s will remember this.

Your teenaged son or daughter waits until you're away for the weekend. A dozen friends are called, booze cabinets are raided and hijinks ensue.

You come home from your holiday to find a stained carpet, a nervous pet, a broken lamp and one very contrite young teen who is grounded for the rest of his life.

Parents of children born after the mid-90s may look upon this scenario and long for the good old days. The days before Twitter turned gatherings into frightening free-for-alls complete with hundreds of unknown party crashers as depicted in the over-the-top party movie Project X released earlier this year.

Back in March, a pair of Calgary high schoolers made headlines for a house party that quickly raged out of control after one of the teens tweeted details of the event.

Though Kris Morrey's mom had originally agreed to let her son host a small gathering, she nixed the use of her home as a venue when the original invitation got retweeted thousands of times under the hashtag #projectkris.

The party was moved over to a Calgary nightclub, where most of the guests found themselves legally unable to enter the over-18 premises.

But sometimes parents are caught unaware.

As CTV News reports, a Barrie, Ont. homeowner is still sweeping up broken pieces of her home after a random tweet on Saturday night drove 200 teens to her son's "modest get-together".

Diane Glenn told the news network that one of the three guests at her son's soiree posted the party details on his Twitter account — including the Glenn family's address.

By the end of the night, hundreds of strangers had blasted through her home, smashing beer bottles, smearing paint on the furniture, tormenting the dogs, breaking cabinets and stealing jewelry and prescription drugs.

Final tally on the destruction clocked in at $40,000, but the real damage went beyond broken objects.

Glenn said in addition to the theft and vandalism, someone allegedly slammed one of the family dogs against the wall.

"Who does this? Who does it?" Glenn told CTV 2 Barrie. "And those parents that dropped their kids off to this house — how could you not have seen what was going on?"

Her son's shindig now joins the list of hundreds of other house parties broken up by police after social media invites made them unmanageable.

York Regional police listed 75 such parties in May alone.

One can only imagine the Facebook photo albums that come out of such domestic chaos.

Also makes you long for the days when disastrous house parties didn't live forever in infamy on the Internet.