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Post #1 Theresa Caputo - Long Island Medium

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Post #1 Theresa Caputo - Long Island Medium

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Kara-Lynn Broad

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The video posted below is a promotional clip for Theresa Caputo's television show Long Island Medium. This video shows the emotional side of Theresa Caputo and how she uses people's emotions to succeed in her work. This can be related to the reason for belief "Emotional Connection". This causes people to believe what she has to say due to the emotional longing for answers about their loved ones that have passed. This TV show has been very popular across America which has caused Theresa to profit off of her 'gift'. This is a lead motivator in her continuing her profession.

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This website posted an article claiming Theresa is a fake medium. This article draws on the ideations that Theresa uses modern technology like social media, to learn things about her audience members prior to attempting to read them.  This draws on the red flag "Proof by verbosity" allowing Theresa, with the help Facebook, to provide a large amount of evidence and information to give the audience the idea that with that much information her readings must be true.

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Theresa Caputo, a self-proclaimed psychic whose Italian origins are quite evident (she was born Theresa Brigandi), has been a celebrity for quite some time now thanks to her reality TV show Long Island Medium. However, all of her apparently paranormal demonstrations are perfectly explainable and, interestingly, most of them would not have been possible only a few years ago.

Caputo, in fact, seems to be the next evolutionary step of contemporary mediums after the likes of Rosemary Altea, John Edward, Sylvia Browne, and James Van Praagh: performers who, from the stage, point to members of the audience and claim to receive communications from the dead on their behalf. In the cases of Altea, Edward, Browne, or Van Praagh, the use of old cold reading techniques is quite clear. These are techniques that undoubtedly require a quick mind, ready to grasp any information coming from the sitter and convincingly sell it back to believers as if it came from the spirits.

Caputo, however, has taken a step forward. Instead of taking risks with straight cold reading-guessing and inevitably making mistakes-she prefers to come well prepared to her shows.

To begin with, Caputo places in the front rows those who she already knows, for whom she already has performed in the past and about whom she has already learned everything there is to know. But her great idea (or perhaps that of her staff) was to take full advantage of what modernity has to offer. In particular, it is thanks to the information found on Facebook and other social media that she can astound her public.

Thanks to an exposé by magician and skeptical investigator Mark Edward (2012), who worked on a "sting operation" on Caputo for Inside Edition, her methods are now quite clear. "In combination with selling seats through Ticketmaster and the use of credit cards, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and all the rest of the latest places people post private information, our own egocentric fascination with ourselves makes it easy for the techie-smart agent or producer to make seeming miracles happen," explains Edward. "Like the old days when the gypsy only needed to tell her sitters what they wanted to hear about themselves, we are now in an era when anyone can tell you more about yourself than you might ever want to know."

Edward relates several such episodes, revealing how absurd this can get: "At one point Theresa asked a woman, '... Why am I picking up baby clothes?' To which the woman replied, 'Oh, that's weird. I just put up a bunch of pictures of baby clothes on my Facebook page!' Not weird at all, really."

It is enough for her to have a few similar bits of information placed beforehand on a seating chart of the show. Her staff can then cue her to the right spots, since all seats are numbered and far apart. She really can't miss. Even the casual encounters that she seems to have on the street during her "reality" program are carefully choreographed. "In classic mentalist style," continues Edward, "everyone must sign a pre-show waiver or agreement to have their image used on television. It's only a standard form to those folks. Why would they suspect anything? They should. All the staff needs is a laptop, a name, an address and a willing victim."

Converting the 'Skeptics'

Karen Stollznow, a linguist, author, and skeptical investigator, wrote about Caputo's exaggerated displays of emotion:

There is rarely a scene where she isn't in tears or claiming empathetic abilities, such as, "I could feel your tears running down my cheek." In one episode she announces that the spirit of a deceased six-year-old boy has become "attached" to her. Convinced that the only way to free the spirit is to meet with his mother, she tracks down the woman whose details she happens to have in an appointment book. Caputo appears to be greatly distraught by the little boy's constant presence, but she is strangely unavailable for a session until the following week. She spent this week in apparent spiritual agony, yet still had time to have lunch with friends, all the while complaining about her invisible friend. (Stollznow 2012)

Another of her specialties is confronting and converting "skeptics." As Stollznow notes:

During a live interview for Long Island radio station KJOY a line of eight "skeptics" are pitted against her. Visibly stressed at first she asks the group, "Who lost a sister?" A woman acknowledges this question, and the medium quickly finds her stride, achieving perceived "hits" with her staple "validations" about clothing and personal letters. Caputo had emotionally disarmed the woman who was taken in by what a real skeptic would readily recognize as a classic cold reading. Skillful editing seems to have ironed out any misses and genuine skeptics.

It is no surprise, then, that in 2012 Theresa Caputo received a Pigasus Award for Performance from the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Today mediums really have an easy life. One wonders what Margery Crandon, D.D. Home, Eusapia Palladino, and all of the famous mediums of the past would have given for a chance to amaze their clients in such an easy way, instead of risking every night to be proven wrong by tipping tables with their legs or exuding ectoplasm gauze. It all seems very silly, in the end, but it is quite distressing to look at the effect that banalities of this kind can have on the grieving. People get emotional; they start to cry and seem to be willing to give Caputo everything they have in order to speak again with their loved ones. Instead of helping the grieving accept their loss and go on with life, such "performers" keep them stuck in their sad situation, preventing their healing. The only consolation is that she won't last long, as this is the fate that awaits all self-styled psychics. "Caputo," admonishes James Randi, "is just one more of the myriad faux seers who have stepped into the TV spotlight for their turn, and though her exuberant shtick rather outdoes the others, she'll do her number along with Van Praagh, John Edward and 'Psychic Sally' until someone with a newer novelty elbows her offstage" (Randi 2012).

References

Edward, Mark. 2012. Is Caputo kaputo yet? Skepticblog (November 9).

Randi, James. 2012. The "medium" is not the messenger. Wired (September 4). Stollznow, Karen. 2012. Long Island medium: A tall story. JREF Swift Blog (June 27).

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Theresa Caputo: The Fake Long Island Medium - CSI

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Theresa Caputo, a self-proclaimed psychic whose Italian origins are quite evident (she was born Theresa Brigandi), has been a celebrity for quite some time now thanks to her reality TV show Long Island Medium. However, all of her apparently paranormal demonstrations are perfectly explainable and, interestingly, most of them would not have been possible only a few years ago.

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This image is a promotional image from her Theresa Caputo LIVE tour. During this tour, it is believed that After selling tickets through Ticketmaster,  Caputo and her staff are able to use the names on the credit cards and their information to identify them and identify where they are to be sitting during her show, and point her in the right direction. With her knowledge of these individuals. This draws on the Red Herring red flag. This distracts the audience from following a logical line of evidence of her claims, ie. not calling on random individuals and having her readings pre planned.

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This article from Good Housekeeping involves Theresa's response to critic's who are skeptical of her readings and insist that they are all cold readings. Theresa's response draws on Agenticity as a reason for belief as she claims it is not her fault, or spirit's fault that there are so many commonalities between her readings.

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In this video, Nicki Smith reports multiple reasons why Theresa is a fake. One of the red flags that she draws on is Confirmation Bias. She recognizes multiple attempts to prompt a reading from individuals but end up being incorrect. However, the amount of positive readings she receives from her clients cause them to overlook the negative readings.

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5 Reasons Why Long Island Medium Is Totally Fake

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This image is from an episode of Dr.Oz, one which Theresa Caputo was featured on. This episode featured Caputo undergoing a brain scan, and having the scan show that prior to beginning a reading, her brain scanned showed a large amount of activity. During scanning, however, there was next to no activity whatsoever. This causes the audience to believe that during readings the brain is not doing any of the work and all of the readings are coming from spirit. This draws on the red flag, Appeal to Authority. By using a well known celebrity doctor, as well as a second health care professional in a white lab coat, causes the audience to be more believing of the potentially incorrect information.

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This article is written by a believer of mediums but a skeptic of Theresa's. She discusses the amount of misses she witnessed during a live performance and how few hits she received. She also goes into how she contorts the information she is given to make it fit her readings. This article insists upon confirmation bias as a red flag for Caputo's practice.

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Long Island News from the Long Island Press

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After my father died suddenly five years ago, I found myself sitting in the upstairs alcove of a high ranch in Kings Park that was decorated in gaudy crucifixes and adorable cherubs. Across from me sat the medium a friend had sworn by. A medium who had told my husband the day before that she'd been visited by my father and that he wanted to talk to me.

She wasn't the first psychic medium I'd been to. And most certainly wasn't the last. She described my father as a veteran (he was), who liked to cook (he did). She gave details about how he died, and described how he'd lived. The message she said he wished to relay to me resonated, quite deeply, but it was what she said to me as we were talking about my budding writing career that turned me into a believer.

"She gets it from me," the medium told me my father had said. As a joke.

A wiseass even in the afterlife? That was what cemented the unbelievable truth to me that my dead father was right there in the room with me.

And so it was with an open mind that I attended Theresa Caputo Live! The Experience at the NYCB Theatre at Westbury on December 17. The packed house was rife with nervous laughter and quiet murmurs as the audience filed in an hour before she came onto Westbury's iconic round stage, set with a high table draped in white cloth, holding lit white candles and a white floral bouquet.

Caputo finally walked out in sky-high sparkly Christian Louboutins and a flouncy dress to thunderous applause. She briefed the audience about what to expect, counseling us to please accept anything we could connect to our lives as messages to us from our departed loved ones from "beyond the physical world." She said she couldn't stress it enough, and she was true to her word, as she continuously reminded the audience throughout the next two and a half hours to interpret her words as direct messages, especially if she failed to address each of us individually.

"It's so nice to be home," the Hicksville mom told the Westbury audience. "Everybody understands my accent!"

The audience laughed in recognition as she enunciated words like "feather' and "father" as "feath-ah" and "fath-ah."

Caputo announced that she wasn't out to prove anything to anybody or to make anyone believe in mediums, echoing a sentiment she'd expressed when I'd interviewed her over the phone a few days earlier. She explained that she was there to validate for us all the feelings that, essentially, there was more to life than life. If we'd thought that maybe we'd seen the shadow of someone who'd died in the halls of our homes, we had. If we could have sworn we heard the voice of our dead mothers, or had been visited in our dreams by loved ones who'd passed, we weren't crazy.

"It's real," she reiterated, over and over, throughout the "experience."

And then she was ready to get started. A team with microphones and video cameras flanked her every move, anticipating to whom she would speak, and transmitting their faces on screens to the whole audience so that we could all watch the magic up-close. She approached a section in the front of the stage, asking, "Who connects with a brother figure?"

Two people immediately raised their hands. She told them that the fact that she was channeling the souls of their brothers meant that those souls were at peace.

"Do you understand that?" she asked, an oft-repeated refrain throughout the night.

They nodded.

Caputo moved on to a man who said he had lost his wife to Alzheimer's disease. She told him that she saw the woman jumping up and down, symbolizing that she was free in the afterlife, no longer bedridden.

"She doesn't have Alzheimer's anymore, do you understand?"

The man nodded.

Caputo asked a well-dressed woman wearing a pink button-down blouse how she could connect with the color mauve. She told the audience that she was seeing a woman in a mauve-colored suit or jacket. The woman nodded, saying that her mother had been an executive secretary. She was sure, she said, that she must have had a mauve suit at some point. But she wasn't sure.

It didn't seem certain that the mother's fashion sense matched that of her daughter.

Caputo moved on, peppering the audience with questions like, "Why am I connecting with a mother figure over here?" and "How does the number three connect?"

Hands shot up all over the theater and Caputo made busy work climbing the steep aisle ramps in her stiletto heels. Her husband Larry, easy to spot as a frequent co-star on her show Long Island Medium, lurked along the edges of the crowd, moving around.

Caputo made quite a few direct hits, like when she asked a man, "Did you mother work in fashion?" to which he replied, "She was a seamstress."

"Perfect!" was Caputo's reply when it seemed she made an exact match. It was her version of "Bingo!"

Clearly emboldened, Caputo continued, making some more specific claims, like, "I have a young woman who is telling me she was shot by her boyfriend or spouse."

Three audience members stood to claim that soul as their own, which perhaps says more about the issue of rampant gun violence than it does about psychic ability.

Caputo stood on the round stage, looking up into the audience. She walked over to a section she hadn't been in yet and started talking to a young woman who was sitting beside her mother. The woman had lost her uncle and had come for some closure.

"Why do I feel like he drowned?" she asked, clutching her chest. She relayed that she felt fluid rising in her chest, and that this was the spirit communicating how he'd died.

The niece shook her head no. That wasn't her uncle.

Caputo insisted, refusing to move, saying that the spirit was instructing her that the person he wanted to connect with was there. She questioned the surrounding people, asking again about a drowning.

Then she announced that she wanted to speak with the mother of a young child who had drowned in a backyard pool during a party.

The audience gasped in both horror and delight. This is what we had come to see.

Yet no one seemed to fit the bill. A woman said that she lost someone who had drowned in river runoff, in about seven feet of water, and she wondered how, as the deceased stood about 6-foot-4. Caputo shook her head. That wasn't who she was looking for.

She approached the woman with the dead uncle again.

"My uncle had a boat?" she offered.

That wasn't it.

"He built pools," the woman said, pointing to her mother. "He built her pool."

That wasn't it, either. Finally the mother told Caputo and the audience that when he had died (of pancreatic cancer), his lungs had filled up with fluid.

"Perfect!" Caputo declared.

The doubt that had started to creep into my mind early on in the show now made a full-court press. I wasn't buying it, any of it.

Caputo threw out more questions to the audience, asking specific questions that, when they weren't met with nods of agreement, became described as merely symbols of other, more general things.

For example, she asked a grieving mother who had lost her grown son, "Why do I feel like you are holding him when he died?"

When the woman shrugged, Caputo quickly covered by saying that that means he believes that she was always there for him.

"Do you smell him?" Caputo questioned another.

When there was no response, she immediately clarified that this meant that it seemed as if that person was still there, even though he had passed some time ago.

Caputo told a woman who was mourning her mother that she was seeing "red spots all over her body." But the woman stated that her mother had had ALS. When Caputo said, "I don't know," the woman clarified, "Lou Gehrig's disease."

Caputo nodded. A debilitating disease all over the body. Perfect, she said.

Caputo told a woman who seemed quite obviously gay that her father approved of her lifestyle, did she understand?

We all understood.

She seemed annoyed when a woman answered the question about a "father-figure" with the fact that he was her uncle.

"It's your uncle. That's a father-figure," Caputo dismissed. "Same thing."

She approached a mother and son and began to talk with them about the man's brother. She hit on a few questions, like when she asked if he wore a religious medallion in honor of the brother and the man produced it right there, from under his shirt. Then she asked what the number three meant to him, and he responded that he had a 3-year-old daughter.

"I Googled that!" she wise-cracked to the crowd in self-congratulation, a wink and a nod to allegations that she and her staff research details about audience members in anticipation of her shows, only to produce them later as part of the psychic act.

As the session wound down, Caputo continued in the same vein, joking with the audience, her signature Lawn Guyland-ese carrying over NYCB Theatre. The people seated around us, and up onscreen, dotted their red-rimmed eyes with tissues fished out of pocketbooks, while still others exited the theater before the performance ended. The reviews, it seemed, were mixed.

After the show, Caputo announced that two lucky audience members had been randomly chosen to meet her backstage. I had been lucky enough to have been given meet-and-greet passes as well, so I waited along with perhaps 20 or so other people after the show ended for the chance to meet Caputo in person.

She emerged from backstage, her outfit changed from the dress to a black jumpsuit, the Louboutins mercifully gone. She chatted with small groups as her staff brought them to her, one by one.

When it was our turn to meet her, I introduced myself as a reporter from the Press, and reminded her that we had spoken a few days before.

"I hope you enjoyed the experience," she told me. "It was a lovely article, I appreciate it very much."

I took the opportunity to ask if she ever came into contact with spirits who were not at peace and that if the souls she encountered were in Heaven, did she ever speak to those who were in the opposing resting place?

"I don't channel those souls," she said, flat-out. "I only channel souls that walk in God's white light."

Then she said to me something oddly curious.

"You know, the first two people that just came? The one girl-it was a mother and daughter-and she said the kid that drowned in the backyard at the pool party? She said, 'That was my son, I just couldn't even speak.'"

"She says, 'I want to thank you because he died many years ago at a pool party.' She left, she's like, 'You have no idea. You changed my life.' It's amazing," continued Caputo.

Amazing coincidence indeed that this particular woman had possessed one of the few backstage passes. Perhaps even more so-and pretty convenient, too, I'd say-that Caputo was able to relay this conversation to a reporter who'd witnessed what had seemed to be a pretty big miss earlier.

Was this an incredible coincidence or merely an attempt at damage control?

For me, this unbelievable experience was simply that: not to be believed. In my humble opinion, Caputo is a damn good performer, and she's got undeniably likeable sass and charisma.

I just don't think she speaks with the dead. Or she didn't the night that I saw her.

But my father probably could have told you that.

Jaime Franchi is the Executive Editor of Morey Publishing. She covers education and contributes news and entertainment pieces for the Long Island Press, along with occasional op-eds when she's in the mood for some hate mail. Her work can also be found on Salon.com, Milieu Magazine, Huffington Post and The New York Times.

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My Not-So-Psychic Experience With 'Long Island Medium' Theresa Caputo

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After my father died suddenly five years ago, I found myself sitting in the upstairs alcove of a high ranch in Kings Park that was decorated in gaudy crucifixes and adorable cherubs. Across from me sat the medium a friend had sworn by.

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This image makes a mockery of the way Theresa Caputo goes about her readings. She starts with an extremely vague question and hopes one of the audience members will answer so she can continue with a potentially cold reading. This image contributes to the Red Herring red flag as it causes the audience to confused and distracted.

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This video, created by another psychic medium, actually draws on why Theresa may be the real deal. She explains as to why Theresa didn't know she was going to be going through a divorce, as people believed she should be able to see everything or know everything. This psychic validates the belief in Theresa by drawing on the Agenticity reason for belief by relating it to spirit not telling them everything about their own lives and claimed the spirit world didn't want her to know about it.

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If Theresa Caputo is psychic, why didn't she know she would get a divorce?