Cinema VinesLisa Kudrow, the actress best known for her role as Phoebe Buffay on the long‑running sitcom Friends, recently shared a haunting personal story on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast. The former star spoke about the night her mother, Nedra Stern, died in 2020 and the series of strange events that followed, which she interprets as her mother’s spirit “flying around” to wake the family.
According to Kudrow, the night of her mother’s passing was marked by a bizarre synchronicity: several family members, each in different locations, were awoken at roughly the same time. She recalled that her brother was already up when he received the phone call about the death, around 2:30 or 3 a.m. Her father, who had been caring for Stern, was also awake when he heard the news. Kudrow added that her husband and sister were likewise up, with her sister’s alarm clock and her brother‑in‑law’s bedroom alarm going off unexpectedly. “My brother was up when he got the call. It was like 2:30, almost 3 in the morning. My father was up when he got the call. My husband was up,” she told listeners.
When the family later discussed what had happened, Kudrow said she felt a connection between the events. “She flew around and woke everybody up when she passed. I don’t think that’s weird at all, except she didn’t wake me up,” she explained, suggesting that her mother’s spirit had been actively reaching out to the living.
In another chilling anecdote, Kudrow described an incident while assembling a slideshow for her mother’s funeral. While scrolling through old photos and replying to text messages, she noticed the word “M-O-M” appearing repeatedly in the message box, even though she had no memory of typing it. She deleted the text each time, assuming it was a glitch. A few days later, she mentioned the occurrence to her husband, Michel Stern, and a friend, who immediately offered a different explanation: “Lisa, your mom texted you.” Kudrow jokingly replied that the message had come “from the beyond.”
In sharing these experiences, Kudrow emphasized that she was not claiming supernatural proof, but rather offering a personal account of the strange timing and messages that followed her mother’s death. The actress’s revelations add a new layer to the public’s understanding of how grief can sometimes feel accompanied by inexplicable phenomena.
