Theresa Caputo knew she was different from a young age.

No, this isn’t about her love of big hair.

It’s about her ability to talk to the dead, although her love of big hair is another of her distinctive traits.

Caputo, who will bring a show of psychic readings and personal reminiscences to the Embassy Theatre on Sept. 17, said it wasn’t until she reached her twenties that she accepted and embraced her gift for communicating with the deceased.

“(When I did that), I felt complete as a person,” she told the Des Moines Register. “I share that part of the story of my life with people because, in some way, shape, or form, we at times feel different.”

We all do feel different at times, although most of the ways we feel different don’t involve conversations with dead strangers.

Belief in the Afterlife

There are plenty of people, some of them prominent, who doubt Caputo’s gift.

“I respect that it’s hard to understand what I do,” she said. “Whether someone believes them, it doesn’t matter to me. (There are people who) believe in what I do.”

She said her goal is not to prove to anyone that she’s not lying about her abilities. It’s to get people to believe that there is a world beyond the one in which we exist while alive.

“I want them to believe in themselves, to believe in an afterlife, to believe and to know the things they’re sensing and feeling that reminds them of their loved ones that have died is real,” Caputo told the Wilkes-Barre Times

When she connects with a soul, she feels it throughout her entire body.

“It’s almost a cooling chill. That’s when the soul moves through me,” Caputo said.

She went on to explain that other bodily responses have different meanings.

“[…]I don’t know how this works,” Caputo said. “All I know is that when I connect with a spirit, I start to sense and feel things that mean absolutely nothing to me, but it’s life-changing to the person standing in front of me.”

And Believe in Yourself

Not every audience member gets a personal reading from Caputo, of course, but she said that everyone who attends her show is likely to walk away changed by the experience.

“People say all the time that they didn’t know what to expect when they walked into that theater, and, even if they didn’t personally get read, they’ll say that what they did witness was absolutely life-changing,” Caputo told New Orleans Living Magazine.

“Because what happens is that it might be something in my speech that touches them, or they hear something through someone else’s reading, or it may be something that they feel or experience during the show themselves that touches them, and that is really the main thing of why I do what I do.”

No matter how a loved one dies, survivors “are left with burdens and guilt and these do not give us the ability to heal,” she said.

“There’s no right or wrong way to heal,” Caputo told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. “But if you’re beating yourself up about a loved one’s passing, you are not allowing yourself to heal.

“I want people to believe in themselves and have a life-changing moment,” she said. “The only thing that’s planned (in my appearances) is my hair and shoes — and that’s it.”