Monica Ten-Kate faces the same pressures that many college students face daily - school work, friends, dating. She just has one other thing to worry about during the day - communicating with dead people.
Ten-Kate is a medium and the star of ABC Family's "Monica the Medium," which wraps its first season tonight. On the show, she receives messages from the spirits of the dead through hearing, feeling, seeing and sensing as well as interpreting certain signs and symbols and communicates those message to their loved ones that are still living.
"It's a mix of all those things happening at once that I then bring together to interpret the message for a client," Ten-Kate told Headlines & Global News in an exclusive interview. "For example, I might smell smoke, feel the energy of an older male. I might hear the name Harry and I might see my symbol for grandfather connection, and he would have been a smoker. So it's all those things... all at the same time, and then I'm like, 'OK, this is a grandfather coming through.'"
The 21-year-old medium accepted her gift in high school. She was familiar with the idea of a medium, but when she conducted more research on the topic, Ten-Kate realized she wasn't the only one having these strange experiences with spirits.
"I definitely Googled, 'What does it mean to hear voices?' Can you imagine Googling, 'talking to dead people?'" the Penn State student said, laughing. "I started to do that research of reading a couple of books and watched some different interviews with mediums on YouTube and some of their readings... The way that they would describe how they came into their gift or experiences they've had with spirit sounded very similar to what I was going through at that time."
Ten-Kate started giving more spontaneous readings, but it wasn't until she finished her first year of college that she came out of the "medium closet." During her sophomore year, she was giving readings every day on top of her daily schedule of college classes and a part-time job. She also had to balance all that with maintaining friendships, dating and having some fun.
"It was the craziest time in my life," she said. "But at that time, I couldn't say no to people. I just wanted to help everybody. Then last year I was like, I'm going to make more of an effort to put my social life first but also do what I do as a medium."
ABC Family started filming "Monica the Medium" at the beginning of her junior year when she moved off campus with her best friend Krista, her friend Julianne, whom she met freshman year, and her new roommate, Ann, who was Julianne's friend and the most skeptical of Ten-Kate's gift.
"I met [Ann] when we moved into our house, maybe two weeks before we filmed the pilot. Everyone thought, 'Did they cast her? Is she like hired by ABC Family?' I'm like, 'No, that was my real roommate," Ten-Kate explained. "She was a little bit skeptical about my gift at first and definitely skeptical about the whole show... It definitely caught her off guard a little bit, but they all took it as an exciting opportunity, something they could always remember and have to look back on."
The show also features Ten-Kate's readings. She hosts clients in her home, impresses her friends at backyard parties or shocks strangers with spontaneous readings while shopping downtown. The young medium only gives readings to willing participants and only delivers messages that will bring comfort.
"Spirit has only ever guided me toward somebody who going to be open to the experience," she said. "It's not always going to be rainbows and butterflies that come in a session, because I've done lots of readings where people will have crossed over due to murder or suicide or drug overdose. So sometimes it's really sad or emotional things that come up, but it's ultimately a very positive experience."
Ten-Kate explains that spirits want to bring a healing message or closure to their loved ones left behind. "The overall message is, 'I don't want you to feel guilty' or 'I don't want you to blame yourself for the fact that my depression took over me and I committed suicide,'" she said.
Because she only approaches people who are likely to accept her messages, Ten-Kate rarely encounters people who outright dismiss her gift. She sometimes meets people who don't understand what she does, but they are usually willing to learn more.
"Knock on wood that it continues to be this way but luckily, and this is true to my life on TV or off, I’ve never had an experience where I went up to somebody where the person was like, ‘No thank you. I don’t want this. Get away from me,’ or spit in my face or something like," Ten-Kate said.
Her devout Catholic mother has also expressed doubt about her daughter's ability, but Ten-Kate has found just as many poeple of faith are skeptical of her gift as those who don't believe in any kind of afterlife. Where she finds the biggest difference is those living in major cities like Los Angeles compared to a small town in Pennsylvania.
"I always joke whenever I’m in LA, I’m never nervous to say who I am and what I do. When I say, I’m a medium, I talk to dead people, they’re like, ‘That’s amazing,’ or ‘That’s so cool, I love that.’ Or they’re like, ‘I know 50 people who do way weirder stuff than you do,’" she said, laughing. "But a little small town in Pennsylvania may be like, ‘Wait, what? That’s kind of weird.’ It’s all just depending where I am, people have different reactions."
Communicating with spirits can leave Ten-Kate exhausted and sometimes she needs to separate herself from the living to escape calls from the great beyond.
"I'm very extroverted, but I am someone who needs that alone time because of the fact of what I do. I always tell people, 'I really need the alone time because I'm never really alone.' When you add in spirit, you really need some time where everything is just shut out and you have that time by yourself," she said. "My friends make fun of me but I'm that type of person where I love to go on vacation just by myself. I went on spring break by myself to Hawaii for a week, and it was the best trip of my life."
ABC Family has renewed "Monica the Medium" for a second season, and Ten-Kate is just getting used to seeing herself on TV as she flips through the channels.
"I'm getting used to it and how my life has changed," she said. "It's pretty much the same just times 50 as far as people who reach out requesting a reading. Other than that, it's pretty much the same."
The season one finale of "Monica the Medium" airs tonight at 8 p.m. EDT on ABC Family.
