10 Disturbing Backstories Behind Your Favourite TV Characters

10. Phoebe Buffay - Friends

Phoebe is the ditzy, quirky, fun friend who would do anything for the people she cares about, but there's a darkness behind all the smiles and laughter. Phoebe's life before the pilot episode of Friends was full of death and misery, and there were some issues with the criminal justice thrown into the mix.

Her mother killed herself when she was a teenager, and since her father left when she was a baby, she ended up being homeless. She mugged people outside a comic book shop and even mugged Ross before they officially knew one another.

She has a twin sister, but they were estranged sometime around their mother's death. Eventually, Phoebe found her birth mother, which came as a complete surprise to her, but not to her sister, who knew all along that the woman who killed herself wasn't their real mom. She also had some run-ins with the law, but the show never went into what that entailed.

Most of what is known about Phoebe's past comes from the various off-handed comments she made on the show. Here are some of the things she said over the years:

"I spent my sweet 16 being chased around a tire yard by an escaped mental patient who, in his own words, wanted to: '[Slay] me, or whatever.'"

She got Hepatitis after "A pimp spit in my mouth."

"Someday I'll tell you about the time I stabbed a cop," followed by, "He stabbed me first!"

"Originally I'm from upstate, but uhm... then my mom [took her life] and my stepdad went to prison, so... I just moved to the city where uhm... I actually lived in a burned-out Buick LeSabre for a while..."