Converted soap actress ministers to lost city

She was a channeler to Shirley MacLaine’s channeler, an honor in the New Age movement that is akin to serving as the pope’s confessor.
   
When she was not conjuring spirits from the next world, she got down in the soap opera mud as the misunderstood other woman cavorting with a pair of brothers-in-law and as the uptight, bigoted wife whose husband was having an affair on shows ranging from “General Hospital” to “Generations.”
   
And now, safe in the religious bosom of the Midwest, Gail Ramsey is taking on the hardest role of her career  —  Hollywood evangelist. On Aug. 12, she went onto Sound Stage 20 on the CBS studio lot and led a group of producers, actors, technicians and entertainment industry workers in prayer in the same town where she played a harlot each day for five years.
   
The slightly built Ohio minister  —  still recognized as Alan Quartermaine’s mistress on “General Hospital”  —  is at the vanguard of several new ministries designed to take God into the area that many evangelicals consider as the belly of the beast.
   
Like the nation of Israel, which some evangelicals speculate will be both the setting of the Lord’s return and of apocalyptic warfare, Hollywood is viewed with special fascination by those contemplating the end times.
   
The celluloid sin city is symbolic of the biblical requirements of great evil occurring before the Second Coming, while the new ministries are signs of God at work even in the darkest times.
   
Who could ask for a better script: a mission of saving the lost in the heart of moral darkness?
   
“It was amazing to be standing in the middle of a sound stage in the middle of Hollywood talking about the Lord,” Ramsey said of her three-month-old ministry called Seeking Truth. “I can’t even describe it. It was just like, ‘God, you’re awesome.’’’
   
The religious odyssey of Ramsey is a true Hollywood story that begins with an innocent young woman raised in Roman Catholic schools in the Midwest heading west to pursue her dreams, and falling in with a lifestyle of power, fame and New Age spirituality that would hit bottom with a dramatic demonic possession in 1990.
   
Through her storyteller’s art, the 52-year-old actress shared how she was sitting on a couch in a friend’s house on New Year’s Eve.
   
Remembering that night, Ramsey stretches her hands over her head and spreads her fingers over the table in a vulturelike position, her face contorting to portray an enraged, disembodied spirit. She describes the feeling of a force taking over her body and propelling her forward to strangle her friend.
   
“I rose up on the couch,” she said in a menacing tone. “What I felt inside of me was like the power of the atom bomb.”
   
It was the devil’s last, best shot, she said now. The spirit that had guided her as a New Age psychic and channeler had been exposed for what it was all along: a force of Satan, she said.
   
Her friend, another actress who recently had become an evangelical Christian, immediately began to pray for her and called up other friends to start a prayer network for the soap opera star.
   
Ramsey’s first reaction, however, was one of anger  —  at God.
   
For two days, she cried out to the heavens, “How could you let me be deceived for so long?”
   
The answer came back: “God told me, `First, I am going to take you out. But one day I will take you back and they will listen to you because you have been there.’”
   
And “there” was not only the top of the soap-opera world but the height of the New Age movement, at a California resort filled with famous actresses and other big names from Hollywood.
   
Kevin Ryerson, a spiritual guru for Shirley MacLaine who has become a sought-after speaker and $350-a-session channeler on the New Age circuit, was giving a seminar and chose Ramsey to come to his cabin and be his personal guide into the spirit world.
   
Ramsey does not remember what was said, but said that she still recalls allowing “a spirit guide” to speak to Ryerson through her body.
   
Leaving the University of Wisconsin in her senior year, she went west to pursue her love of acting.
   
“At first I was offended by everything I saw,” she said. “The longer I remained in that environment, slowly but surely I was affected by the darkness, the lack of morality.”
   
On screen, she was hopping in and out of marital beds as “sexy Susan Moore” from 1979 to 1983 on “General Hospital.”
   
In her personal life, Ramsey had star power and lots of money, but could find no more fulfillment than her screen characters. She tried transcendental meditation, psychics, anything she could find.
   
“What was the truth? What was the truth? What was the truth? I was searching everywhere,” she said.
She would go on to prominent television roles in “Mike Hammer” with Stacy Keach, the soap opera “Generations” and the sitcom “California Dreams.” She would also make her way up the psychic world to become a channeler to others.
   
And then came the New Year’s Eve of her dramatic conversion.
   
She left Hollywood in 1993, deciding to move to Columbus, Ohio, after being invited for a visit by a friend there.
   
She attended the World Harvest Bible School in Columbus and was ordained as a nondenominational minister in 1995.
   
Life without the limousines and star power has never been better, she said. “I think people on the whole are really intimidated by Hollywood power, and I’m not,” Ramsey said. “I say God is still the devil’s boss.” (RNS)