Funnily enough, this has happened to my phal. When one of the blooms died, the stem elongated, but the distance between the last flower and bud was about half the normal distance between nodes. The flowers looked clumped but now they've died except for the very last one, so it looks decent.

I think that occured cos i had just bought and moved it, so maybe it was under some stress. I have also never fed it, so that could also be the prob.

Btw, it is starting a secondary spike, so i'll see what the node distance is on that one.

Praveer