Will Medium Travis Holp Sense Any Spirits Onstage in Addison?

As a child, Travis Holp knew something was different. He was afraid to sleep alone in his room at night, mostly because he didn’t feel alone at all. Holp says he turned to drugs and alcohol at a young age to distract from those feelings and visited several psychiatrists and psychologists to try and find out what was troubling him.

It wasn’t until Holp visited a medium who predicted that he would become a medium himself that he found the root of his unease. After picking up tarot cards for the first time, Holp felt that he was connected in some form to the “continuation of consciousness,” as he calls it.

“My body recognized it as anxiety,” he says. “When I’m connecting for someone, or I feel a spirit communicator coming through, I will get this feeling of anxiety in my chest, and then spirits will start giving me impressions.”

Holp entered the world of professional mediumship in 2020, eventually taking his readings to TikTok, where he’s amassed 471,000 followers and 10.9 million likes. This weekend, he embarks on the “Dead Serious” tour, his first nationwide trek since entering the field. It kicks off on Saturday in Austin at Cap City Comedy. He hits North Texas on Sunday, March 16, at the Addison Improv.

But with mediumship being such an inherently intimate process, how could it translate to a stage show?

“When I get out there, it’s totally just whatever comes up,” Holp says. “I don’t have a plan, I have nothing rehearsed. It’s just showing up on stage and trusting that people’s dead loved ones want to talk to me. In the mediumship world, it’s called a demonstration. It’s just about showing up and surrendering to the spirit and allowing whatever messages that need to come through, come through.”

Holp clarified that he would have no access to ticket information or to information about where people were sitting before the event. Everything he does on stage is to be off the cuff.

“The purpose of a demonstration is not to show off my skills,” he says. “It’s really to show the continuation of consciousness beyond this physical vessel by sharing those evidential things that other people couldn’t know.”

Holp referenced a moment during a previous demonstration in Oklahoma City, where he met a woman grieving her late aunt near the back of the room. For some reason, Holp felt something related to confetti cannons, and the shocked woman informed him that her family set off confetti cannons at her aunt’s funeral. He was then given the phrase “grab life by the balls.”

“Which is like, such a crazy thing to say,” Holp says. “That’s not something I would use or say. So she holds up a keychain with testicles on it and goes, ‘She gave me these before she passed.’”

It was a funny moment amidst a deeply emotional career. Holp must balance his spiritual connection while maintaining a rapidly intimate human bond.

“I have a lot of parents who lose their kids,” he says. “I am a gay, single man. I have zero children. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a child, so my job is just to hold that container of healing, create that safety for parents to connect again, or to just feel the energy and presence of their child. It’s more so sitting from a place of compassion versus empathy. Empathy is kind of like, ‘I’m in the mud with you.’ Compassion is, ‘I feel for you, and I’m going to hold this space for you.’”

Holp will be at the Addison Improv on Sunday afternoon, with the event scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. Tickets are available online for seated parties or individuals, all of whom are encouraged to bring items that once belonged to their lost loved ones if they wish.

“I can’t read for everybody,” he says of the show. “Just come with an open mind and come to have fun. Expect to laugh, definitely expect to cry.”