“Don’t be discouraged because I’m at such a large venue. I’m not on stage the whole time,” Theresa Caputo said in a phone interview about her upcoming “Theresa Caputo Live! The Experience” tour date at Temple University’s Liacouras Center.
TLC’s “Long Island Medium,” who promised that she’d wear “fabulous shoes” and have her hair and nails done up right on Oct. 2, said it’s surprising where the spirits guide her in the audience during her live shows, to deliver what she describes as encouraging healing messages to their living loved ones. When Caputo steps off the stage to go who-knows-where for on-the-spot readings, cameras will follow her, beaming a feed to a video display for all to see. “I don’t have control of it,” she commented.
Although most people respect her boundaries (for instance, she does not do readings over the phone), Caputo said, “the spirits have to have a little reminder.”
“I have the most amazing fans. They’re so respectful. I feel blessed and so honored … to give people a piece of hope and restore their faith,” said Caputo, a practicing medium for more than 15 years, who has also written the books “There’s More to Life Than This: Healing Messages, Remarkable Stories and Insight from the Other Side” and “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: Life Changing Lessons from Heaven.”
A not-so-fun side of being a public figure, she said, was learning about how people were taking advantage of her fans by, for example, re-selling tickets to her shows with a steep mark-up. It led to the formation of an official fan club. For $19.99, Theresa Caputo fan club members get access to ticket pre-sales, occasional giveaways and more.
One frequently asked question she gets is if being a medium ever gets scary. “When it became scary was when everyone wasn’t sensing what I was. To me, talking to dead people is normal,” Caputo said.
Once struggling with anxiety over what to do about communicating with souls on the other side, which she first discovered at 4 years old, it took a spiritual healer and teacher named Pat Longo to get her to come to terms with her abilities. She now believes that everyone has the ability to communicate with departed loved ones.
On her website, Caputo says: “Clients, fans and the media always ask me to describe how I receive information, and it’s hard to put into words because I see, hear and feel things differently than we do in the physical world. Spirit mostly speaks to me through a sixth sense – a kind of feeling and knowing. When I get information, it feels like very strong intuition, or recall. Spirit also uses a vocabulary of signs and symbols that they show me during a reading; over time, I assigned words, phrases and meanings to certain images I was shown, and then through trial and error, Spirit helped me add new ones until we created an entire vocabulary for us to work with. I translate my signs and what I feel as best I can, and then deliver the messages, but it’s the client’s job to interpret how the meaning is significant. It’s like piecing together a puzzle, and can sometimes sound like guesswork, but Spirit speaks ‘another language,’ at another speed and in another dimension.”
Caputo is aware that she has more than just a few skeptical critics. “It is what it is. Everyone has their own opinion,” she said in the interview. Spirits of loved ones, she insists, “bring up things that there’s no way I could know about. They talk about your own personal feelings. You know what your experiences are.”
As for what next year’s season of “Long Island Medium” has in store, “we’re gonna have some celebrity readings you’re not gonna want to miss,” she said.
