She’s one of the most popular reality stars on TV today. For three seasons now, Theresa Caputo, the Long Island Medium, has amazed viewers and brought people to tears by communicating messages from beyond.
“I have a very special gift. I talk to the dead,” Caputo says on her hit series.
[...]
So is the Long Island Medium really communicating with those who have passed on, or is she simply using trickery to fool the living? INSIDE EDITION decided to see what happens at her popular live readings across the country. What we saw was starkly different from what viewers see on her TV show.
On TV, she’s almost always dead right, but at her live shows, we watched her strike out time and again.
Caputo asked one audience member, “Is your mom also departed?” “My mom? No, she’s with us,” said the audience member.
“Is your mom departed?” she asked another fan. The woman responded, “My mom? No, she’s still with us.”
Caputo asked another audience member, “Did they pass one right after the other?” to which the audience member responded by shaking their head ‘no.’
She asked one person, “Was this on your mother’s side.” “No, my dad’s,” she replied.
“I know a trick when I see one,” said Mark Edward, after watching the L.I. Medium’s live show. Edward once made a living as a psychic, but he’s now coming forward to reveal the secrets that he says some psychics use to convince people they really do communicate with the dead.
Edward believes one technique Theresa Caputo uses is a classic trick called “cold reading.” It’s done by firing-off open-ended questions that someone in a large audience will surely relate to, like a number.
“How do you connect with the number 2? Is it the month of February? The day?” Caputo asked an audience member.
I have one question for this Long Island psychic: Did she predict the absolute devastation hurricane Sandy would bring to Long Island? No? Really? But, but, but … she’s psychic!!! Right?
If you didn’t watch the Nov. 8th episode of “Inside Edition,” you missed an expose of “America’s favorite psychic” and star of the popular “Long Island Medium” television “reality” series, Theresa Caputo. A few weeks ago I was asked to take part in a “sting” on Caputo with several IE investigative reporters who had been singling out Caputo for a serious takedown for months. We worked hard to reveal her for what she is – a fast talker of the lowest order. There was no question she was doing old cold reading bits, but her other methods were less obvious to the untrained eye. I was put on the case in New York City for four days. It was a eye-opening experience and great fun watching Caputo going through her histrionics, but I quickly learned that mediums and psychics are getting more and more slippery and hard to catch red-handed than they were only a decade ago.
Like many of the latest crop of bullshit tossers making the rounds, Theresa and her savvy crew have learned from the mistakes of others like Sally Morgan, John Edward and Jimmy VanPraagh. Instead of taking chances with too much guessing, Theresa bumps-up her percentage of hits and avoids bad misses by front-loading her stage shows with a combination of techniques; some time tested like cold reading and planting previous clients they have already read for in specific seats in the audience, (ala Rosemary Altea on the Penn & teller “Bullshit!” episode I worked on) but also making use of the latest social media outlets.
In combination with selling seats through Ticketmaster and the use of credit cards, Facebook, Fousquare, 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. 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.
At the show we saw, 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. With five or six gathered bits of information like that placed beforehand on a seating chart of the show it’s easy to be cued by her staff of roving microphone and camera people. All seats are numbered and the sections are far enough apart so even Theresa can’t screw up: a red shirt is a fireman, down in front under the lights is the missing child, on the left is the suicide’s mother, etc.
After watching this crew with their equipment move over to a person who was next called upon by Theresa, it became apparent that only one of two things could be happening. The only two logical reasons for the roving crew to move BEFORE Theresa points out the person in the audience they are standing near are:
1. Theresa has already planned with her crew what people she is going to be talking to before the show.
2. The crew is psychic and knows who Theresa is going to be calling on.
I leave it to the reader to decide which option is more likely.
On the heavily edited segments for Caputo’s so-called “reality” program, everyone who happens to apparently casually “bump into” Theresa on the street or in supermarkets or beauty parlors, each is a carefully choreographed set-up. In classic mentalist style, 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.
The slippery part is this perfect storm of information availability seems to make no sense when you watch Theresa live doing nothing but asking a non-stop machine gun scatter shot of questions, one after the other. It would be so much easier for her to just stick to a list of sure-fire pre-show information. That’s what I would do… So why doesn’t she stick to that strategy?
I’ll tell you why: She’s not a professional mentalist for one, and also because if she did use all the information available all the time, she would be far too accurate and her audience of adoring believers would begin to smell a rat. She has to play that “odds” part down to a believable minimum. It’s the “less is more” angle mediums have been using for centuries.
It was amazing to see her act “surprised” by her hits, as if she had no idea how she did it. Maybe a few times she was genuinely surprised
She’s one of the most popular reality stars on TV today. For three seasons now, Theresa Caputo, the Long Island Medium, has amazed viewers and brought people to tears by communicating messages from beyond.
“I have a very special gift. I talk to the dead,” Caputo says on her hit series.
[...]
So is the Long Island Medium really communicating with those who have passed on, or is she simply using trickery to fool the living? INSIDE EDITION decided to see what happens at her popular live readings across the country. What we saw was starkly different from what viewers see on her TV show.
On TV, she’s almost always dead right, but at her live shows, we watched her strike out time and again.
Caputo asked one audience member, “Is your mom also departed?” “My mom? No, she’s with us,” said the audience member.
“Is your mom departed?” she asked another fan. The woman responded, “My mom? No, she’s still with us.”
Caputo asked another audience member, “Did they pass one right after the other?” to which the audience member responded by shaking their head ‘no.’
She asked one person, “Was this on your mother’s side.” “No, my dad’s,” she replied.
“I know a trick when I see one,” said Mark Edward, after watching the L.I. Medium’s live show. Edward once made a living as a psychic, but he’s now coming forward to reveal the secrets that he says some psychics use to convince people they really do communicate with the dead.
Edward believes one technique Theresa Caputo uses is a classic trick called “cold reading.” It’s done by firing-off open-ended questions that someone in a large audience will surely relate to, like a number.
“How do you connect with the number 2? Is it the month of February? The day?” Caputo asked an audience member.
Harsha Maddula, a Northwestern University pre-medical student from Long Island, N.Y., went missing Sept. 22, last seen leaving an off-campus party in Illinois. Police and volunteer searchers were unable to find him, but Maddula’s family said reassuring words from psychics had raised their spirits.
Apparently, psychics contacted by the Maddula family’s relatives in India said Harsha was okay and would be found: “He’s still alive. Don’t worry.’”
The next day, however, Maddula’s body was found in Wilmette Harbor near his dormitory. He’d been dead for nearly a week, hidden from searchers in the water between two boats. There was no sign of struggle, robbery, or assault; though toxicology tests are still underway, police believe he was likely the victim of an accidental drowning.
This is only the latest of many cases where grieving families of missing persons have been given false hope by psychics. Despite the failure of psychic detectives to locate missing people, desperate families often turn to psychic and soothsayers.
It happens regularly: grieving families hoping psychics will recover their missing loved ones are always disappointed. Still, even if they don’t believe in psychics, they conclude that nothing else has worked, so there’s no harm in trying.
Indeed, as a news article on Michigan Live.com noted, the mother of a missing woman will be seeking advice from a nationally-known psychic next week: “The mother of Venus Stewart, who has been missing since April 2010 and is presumed to have been killed by her estranged husband, has been invited to appear on the syndicated talk show ‘Dr. Phil,’” according to Live.com. The news article went on to say the mother Therese McComb of Colon, Mich., would fly to Los Angeles next week to tape the show, which will air in November. On the show, famed psychic John Edward will try to contact Stewart’s spirit to possibly get information about the whereabouts of her body.
“I’m desperate’ to find Stewart’s body and have closure,” McComb said. ‘This is about a desperate mother. That’s what it is,” she added.
If Edward can lead police and the McComb family to where Venus Stewart is, dead or alive, it would be the first time it’s happened.
MORE . . . Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and author of six books including Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries. His Web site is www.BenjaminRadford.com.
On July 17, 1996 TWA flight 800 took off from JFK airport on its way to Paris. Fifteen minutes into its flight, shortly after climbing to about 13,000 feet, the jet exploded in mid air. The nose of the jet fell off into the Atlantic while the rest continued to fly, erratically while on fire and spewing smoke, until 42 seconds later when there was a second explosion. The right wing and the rest of the fuselage separated and descended as two separate streams of burning debris until they hit the surface of the water 7 seconds later. All 230 people aboard lost their lives.
Sixteen years later there are still those who believe that TWA flight 800 was shot down by a missile. This is despite the fact that the largest and most expensive investigation in history into the crash of a commercial airliner came to a very different conclusion. I had the opportunity this past week to speak to six different eyewitnesses of this tragedy, some of whom firmly believe a missile took down the jet, while others are unsure. The incident remains a classic historical case demonstrating the fallibility of perception and eyewitness accounts.
In my line of work, I hear horror stories every day. Some involve ghosts and goblins or psychics with premonitions, but not in the way you might expect. The James Randi Educational Foundation exists to bring light to claims of the paranormal, and often to the ways people fake paranormal abilities to take advantage of others: from false hope to reconnect grieving families with dead relatives to offering hollow promises of miraculous cures. So when I heard that priceline.com was featuring “Long Island medium” Theresa Caputo in their commercials, I knew I had to fire off a letter to Priceline’s CEO and ask them to prove that Ms. Caputo is what she claims to be. And I even put a million dollars on the line.
Read our letter for yourself, and consider giving priceline.com your own thoughts on the Long Island Medium here.
To: Jeff Boyd, Chief Executive Officer, Priceline.com
Dear Mr. Boyd,
On behalf of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) and the countless Americans who have been exploited by fake psychics and mediums, I am writing to address your recently debuted commercial campaign featuring “medium” Theresa Caputo, performing her usual gimmick of claiming to communicate with dead people, and to make you an offer of one million dollars if she can prove her talents are real. As you know, in your ad, she speaks to the fictional “Priceline Negotiator” from beyond the grave, but sadly, she claims to speak to the dead in real life as well, and the results are not so funny.
Since 2011, Ms. Caputo has starred in her own reality series, Long Island Medium on TLC, wherein she purports to speak to her often grieving clients’ dead relatives. I have seen the show myself, and as a magician and a skeptic, I couldn’t help but notice that her “readings” looked suspiciously like a well-known manipulative collection of psychological techniques by which self-proclaimed psychics and mediums make it seem like they are receiving otherwise-impossible messages from the deceased. It is difficult to watch the show and not feel heartbroken for those who are desperate to hear from the departed… and even more so if they are being manipulated by a charlatan.
I respectfully invite you to have your new representative, Ms. Caputo, apply for the James Randi Educational Foundation’s Million Dollar Challenge. Since 1996, the JREF has offered a prize of $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal ability under mutually agreed-upon scientific conditions and without cheating. So far, no one has claimed the prize. Should Ms. Caputo win, we would be happy to award the prize to the charity of your and her choosing. Perhaps the Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County, of which your company is fond?
If Ms. Caputo can do what she claims to do, she ought to be thrilled to have the opportunity to prove to the world that her talents are real, and to give the prize money to a worthy cause (or to keep the million dollars for herself). If she is unwilling to take the challenge, I suspect her talents may be as manipulative as her motivations are selfish. In fact, the JREF recently awarded Ms. Caputo this year’s tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award for paranormal performers, to highlight the harm of her untested claims. Please consider salvaging priceline.com‘s good name by putting your new spokesperson to the test. After all, you wouldn’t hire a doctor to represent your company without asking for her credentials, would you? Let’s make certain that this medium’s astounding claims are legitimate, as opposed to greedy manipulations of those who are mourning.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you.
Theresa Caputo is the winner of the 2012 Pigasus Award for Performance. But she is better known as the Long Island Medium, which is also the title of her reality TV show aired on the ‘Learning’ Channel (TLC). Like Sylvia Browne, John Edward, James van Praagh and many others before her, Caputo is yet another psychic medium who claims to be able to talk to the dead, and while she has artificial talons like Sylvia Browne, her blond helmet hair, jewelry and tan are all fake too. When it’s eventually axed, there will probably be room for the cast on Jersey Shore.
Caputo can’t grab a morning coffee or shop for groceries without providing spontaneous readings to strangers along the way.
Of course, these are just cold readings of stereotypical subjects; usually older ladies who are asked, “Did your mother/father pass?” Obviously, she/he had, so Caputo proceeds to share a stock message, such as she “loves you”, he has “found peace” or he is telling you it’s time to “move on”. Alternatively, Caputo performs the same tricks for groups, like a kind of psychic Tupperware party. As believers, these people are pushovers, and with a larger pool of subjects she never fails to strike with questions like, “Did someone here lose a brother?” Making her task even easier still, she never guesses the name or the initials of the deceased. To “validate” contact, Caputo makes vague references that have the appearance of being specific; special songs, handwritten letters, and items of clothing and jewelry. Those read are interviewed afterwards, gushing that they are indebted to Caputo for helping them come to terms with the death of their loves ones.
Mary Occhino is a rising psychic star in the national spotlight. In the last few years she has written three books, hosted a radio show on which she gave medical readings, and had a reality television show called Mary Knows Best on the Syfy cable network. The show spotlighted Occhino raising “a colorful Long Island Italian-American family” and living everyday life with a psychic ability.
Over the years, Occhino has claimed to assist in missing persons cases, talk to the dead, and peer into the futures of celebrity lives. This article delves into Occhino’s predictions and activities, revealing that while Occhino is short on claims, her claims are short on independent proof. The independent evidence shows that when it comes to predictions, Occhino doesn’t know best.
She’s one of the most popular reality stars on TV today. For three seasons now, Theresa Caputo, the Long Island Medium, has amazed viewers and brought people to tears by communicating messages from beyond.
In combination with selling seats through Ticketmaster and the use of credit cards, Facebook, Fousquare, 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. 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.
So is the Long Island Medium really communicating with those who have passed on, or is she simply using trickery to fool the living? 
Harsha Maddula, a Northwestern University pre-medical student from Long Island, N.Y., went missing Sept. 22, last seen leaving an off-campus party in Illinois. Police and volunteer searchers were unable to find him, but Maddula’s family said reassuring words from psychics had raised their spirits.
Indeed, as a news article on Michigan Live.com noted, the mother of a missing woman will be seeking advice from a nationally-known psychic next week: “The mother of 
On July 17, 1996 
By 
In my line of work, I hear horror stories every day. Some involve ghosts and goblins or 
