Karen Tatro remembers the moment vividly when she realized she wasn’t alone in this world.
She was around seven years old and had snuck out into the living room to watch TV late at night while her parents slept.
“I got this feeling to go to my bedroom,” Tatro said. “I remember walking down the hallway and my bedroom door was ajar and there was this glow coming from my room.”
Inside she found this angelic being with colorful swirls, beautiful eyes and long hair. She remembers not being afraid, but rather this familiar feeling.
“That particular figure has shown up a number of times in my life,” Tatro said.
Tatro knows that not everyone will believe in what she can see and hear, but it’s not like she chose to be a medium with the ability to communicate with spirits.
For much of her childhood, she didn’t know what it was. There were times she would wake up at night and see people in her room, talking to her, but she had an active imagination and a psychiatrist even told her parents that.
After seeing the “Exorcist” as a young teenager, which totally freaked her out, she shut it down.
“It wasn’t happening to anyone else in my family,” Tatro said.
She went through high school and her early adult life essentially ignoring what was happening around her.
Her family moved to New Hampshire in 1980 when she was in eighth grade after living in New York, Arizona, Illinois and Colorado. She went to ConVal High School and took only one semester of college before realizing it just wasn’t for her. She went to hair school and eventually purchased the Hair Smith in Peterborough.
As a hair stylist, Tatro had moments that set in motion her life’s work. She chalked them up to “Karenisms,” but it left clients with questions.
“I would say things and they’d look at me and say how do you know that?” Tatro said. “But at the time I wasn’t really embracing all my abilities.”
It was 10 years ago when Tatro decided it was time to go down this unknown path to see where it would lead. She was happy, but at the same time felt this indescribable loss inside.
“I felt this inner calling,” she said. “I needed to understand all of this. I needed to honor my spirituality.”
Tatro describes it as a feeling of one foot on Earth and one in the clouds. As a way to work through what she was feeling – and hearing – she created a digital magazine called “The Mirror”. It was half spirituality, half paranormal because as she put it “they have to be the same, right?”
For the first issue, she visited the Shanley Hotel in Napanoch, New York.
“I walked in the door and it was all of a sudden, it was there,” she said.
It was overwhelming, but she didn’t let fear get in way. She counted more than 30 spirits in the famously haunted hotel and what she was hearing and seeing was validated through research.
She then visited a home in Antrim where the homeowner just felt something else was there. Tatro found two men having a conversation, one of which had an accident in the home that led to his death.
Soon more people started to reach out. She did one of her first readings for a woman in town, who Tatro had never met and was nervous about it. All she knew of the woman was her first name and they communicated through an online chat. A man came forward and soon Tatro had this feeling like her heart was going to explode. Turned out the man had taken his own life by shooting himself in the chest and that was what Tatro described as the beginning of everything.
“I remember feeling this is real,” she said. ” I immediately knew I needed to do readings. I needed to be using this ability.”
Since then, Tatro has done readings for people all over the world seeking answers and comfort. She does them both in person at her studio in Antrim, where she has lived for almost 30 years, and online. She is still amazed at what happens during a reading – it’s hard to truly explain what goes on around her. Tatro doesn’t ask questions, but rather invites people to come forward.
“I’m not reading the person, I’m listening to the spirits around them,” she said.
Her husband Steve wasn’t a believer at first. Not until she went to another home in Antrim and met the spirit of a little boy searching for his parents and told him the story. It was something she would have never known, about how this little boy died after falling into a septic tank. She didn’t believe it until research confirmed it.
“Being that middle person gives me great joy,” Tatro said. “Some spirits hold on because they don’t want to leave, so to be able to assist them for whatever reason is important.”
It would be awfully difficult to walk around, constantly inundated with voices flying around, so over the years, Tatro has learned how to “tune in.” Sometimes things creep through, like at night when she wakes up to beings in her bedroom, but the 52-year-old has enough experience to allow her to live a normal life most of the time.
“None of this is anything I ever sought out,” Tatro said. “But I truly believe we are energy, it’s pronounced, and it changes forms when we pass.”
In addition to her mediumship readings, Tatro also performs rune stone readings, in which she uses a set of stones to bring things forward. She videotapes the readings and then sends them to her clients, most of which she only knows by first name.
On the paranormal side, she’s hosted events at the Lizzie Borden and Mark Twain houses. There’s also been visits to the Mount Washington Hotel and Wentworth by the Sea and she recently held an Enchanted Spirit Gallery at Hilltop Golf Course in Peterborough.
“I started hosting events to provide opportunities for people to visit haunted locations and to experience their abilities as well,” Tatro said. “Everybody has abilities. We’re all intuitive.”
For the last three years, she’s been working to create a pilot TV show with an established producer because “the paranormal shows don’t show the whole story.”
Since her work is all about people, Tatro describes herself as a homebody in her free time. She likes to be outside and go camping. And wrote a children’s book, “I’m a Super Hero — I’m not Afraid of Ghosts.”
She has two children, Nicole, 23, and Garrett, 18. Tatro says both of them have abilities as well.
After moving around a lot as a kid, Tatro has enjoyed the life that small town New Hampshire has provided. Her husband was born and raised in Antrim and she wanted that kind of opportunity for her children.
And when her time on this Earth comes to an end, Tatro believes there is another world on the other side – her work has shown her just that.