Contributed photos from Richard Marchisotto / TV personality/author/spiritual medium Theresa Caputo will appear Friday at Memorial Auditorium.For a long time as a child, Theresa Caputo, known to TV fans as "The Long Island Medium," assumed everybody heard from dead people, as she did when her deceased great-grandmother would visit her at the end of her bed.
Or, the time her nanny visited her at a family gathering.
"I was 16 and talking to someone by the window and my cousin came up and asked who I was talking to," Caputo said.
"Nanny."
"You're talking to the drapes," the cousin said.
"I thought it was normal."
The performer, TV personality and author said her very Catholic family, especially her parents, never made an issue of her ability to communicate with the dead, but as she got older, she realized it was not the norm for most people.
"I have said for years, if not for my parents and their understanding, who knows where I might be. I'm the first to say what I do seems crazy. I suffered from anxieties because I was blocking it in a sense."
Therapy helped, but when in her early 20s, a suggestion by her mother to go see a spiritual healing medium changed her life.
"It was like a safe space that allowed me to understand my gift and say, 'OK, why am I blessed with this gift?' I said, 'God, if this is my soul's journey, I'll put my gift in your hands and I will work with it.'"
Since then, she said, her life consists of spending days on end on a tour bus or flying around the world acting as a spiritual medium for people and their departed loved ones or acquaintances. She does this during one-on-one sessions, on talk shows and during live performances such as the one she will give at Memorial Auditorium on Friday at 7:30 p.m.
She said what she does is serve as the go-between for people and someone who has died. She has a process that involves the dead giving a sign or a symbol that is personal to them and the living for identifying the deceased, and then when she is convinced they are who they say, she asks them to communicate with the living with their own personality and with laughter.
Some of the messages from the dead revolve around simply letting the living know they are OK.
She does not make predictions nor tell people what to do with their lives, nor does she have dreams that are predictive.
"People who come to the shows are witnessing what we need to hear, not what we want to hear," she said.
Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.