For many millennials, Brittany Murphy was the face of a generation, lighting up screens in classics like Clueless, 8 Mile and Uptown Girls.
For fans, she wasn't just an actor but a fixture of their coming-of-age years. That's why her sudden death in 2009, at just 32 years old, felt like a gut punch — one of those "where were you when you heard?" moments.
In the nearly 15 years since she passed, many questions death have lingered.
But among the myriad theories, there's one detail that often gets overlooked: the home she shared with her husband Simon Monjack and her mum, Sharon Murphy.
Watch: Medium claims contact with Brittany Murphy. Article continues after video.
Laura Brodnik, co-host of The Spill, reflected on Murphy's legacy recently, saying, "She was an actress that I had grown up with, who had been in so many of my favourite movies that my sisters and brother and I used to play over and over again."
But what has stuck out to fans of the late icon was Murphy's strange aversion to the home she lived in during the months leading up to her death.
Listen to the hosts of The Spill discuss the story here. Post contnutes below.
"[Simon] said that they used to be driving towards their home, and she would turn to him and say, before they got to the driveway, 'Please, please, I don't want to stay there. Can we please go and stay in the Beverly Hills Hotel?" Brodnik said.
Monjack reportedly insisted they had to stay, telling her, "We have this huge house. We're going to have to live in it."
Simon would go on to tell reporters that Murphy thought the property was "unlucky," and that the couple had planned to move to New York.
The house, located on Rising Glen Road, had a history of unsettling experiences even before Murphy moved in. It had previously belonged to Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, who were dating at the time, and Spears' former makeup artist, Julianne Kaye, recounted one eerie experience in the 'Toxic' singer's former home.
"[Spears] had that place up on Sunset Plaza — and I'm just gonna say, this is really weird … She calls me … I had my friend do reiki healing on her," Kaye explained on an episode of the We Need to Talk About Britney podcast in February 2021.
"He had come up — I guess she'd had a crazy partying weekend and needed to relax. He left, and she swears to God that he opened some spirit portal or something, and these bad spirits had come in… and they were trying to, like, push her down the stairs or something crazy."
Kaye continued: "It was so bad that she left. She went to the Casa Del Mar hotel to stay there and never went back to the house. She goes, 'I know you're gonna think I'm crazy. I'm not crazy. I know what I saw. I know what I felt.'"
The eerie parallels between Spears' and Murphy's experiences are hard to ignore. Both women — talented, young, and under immense pressure — felt something was deeply wrong with the house.
Despite her alleged protestations, Murphy and Monjack stayed, and in December 2009, the star collapsed in the property's bathroom and passed away soon after.
At around 3am, Murphy went out to the balcony saying that she needed to get some air. Her husband then said that she began gasping for breath, and so he called out for her mum, Sharon, to come upstairs.
After Sharon got upstairs, she later said that her daughter looked at her and said, "Mum, I'm dying. I love you," before collapsing.
Murphy's official cause of death was pneumonia and severe anaemia. But in another strange series of events, just five months later, Monjack also died in the house under nearly identical circumstances. A coroner determined Simon had also died of acute pneumonia and severe anaemia.
This series of events only fuelled a sense of mystery around the young star and her husband's passing. Toxic mould was floated as a potential cause for the deaths, though no evidence of this was ever found.
Following the deaths, the house on Rising Glen Road was sold at a significant loss in 2011, then torn down and rebuilt years later.
Feature image: Getty.
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