Witnessing the Spirit of the Dog : ‘He ran across new-fallen snow. There were no footprints.’

My only prior knowledge of faith healing came from the old movie “Elmer Gantry,” in which Burt Lancaster seduced Jean Simmons under the Santa Monica Pier. So I didn’t know what to expect when I visited Raylah Hammond, whose Amiya Institute of the Healing Arts is in a room behind the garage of her home on a modest residential street in Canoga Park.

At worst, I figured, she might thrash on the floor or speak in tongues. At best, she might levitate and float about the room or transmogrify into a bizarre and amusing form, thereby providing a conversation piece to be exploited down at Teddy’s Saloon. Guess what I saw today? I was ready for anything.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when Raylah Hammond turned out to be a good-humored, middle-aged woman who seemed more at home behind a shopping cart at Von’s than transmitting cosmic energy through her fingertips into my head. She neither thrashed on the floor nor bounced across the paneled ceiling like a Mickey Mouse balloon. She sat and talked and told me about the dog spirit.

Let me say first that the reason I visited Hammond was because I have become increasingly aware over the past few months of the number of, well, offbeat religions that abound in the Valley. I figured as part of your continuing education it was incumbent upon me to visit one, although offbeat is a term subject to interpretation. My mother, for instance, considered Protestanism offbeat.

I got some idea of what I was running into at the Amiya Institute when a secretary asked me to remove my shoes before entering. I said all right, but that’s all I intended on removing. Hammond laughed and said the shoeless ritual began when she bought new carpeting for the room and didn’t want people tracking in dirt when they entered through the garage. It worked. The carpet is spotless.

She calls herself the Reverend Hammond, by the way, having been ordained at the Healing Light Center in Glendale. In the event that didn’t take, I guess, she also ordained herself.

I asked her how she discovered she had the power to transmit healing cosmic rays.

“This is going to sound crazy,” she said, a little embarrassed.

I assured her I was receptive to any strange explanation, having covered two Ronald Reagan presidential campaigns, and would not consider whatever she told me crazy.

“Well,” she said, “it was when I first saw a spirit that I realized I had some sort of gift.”

So far, not that unusual.

But then: “It was the spirit of a dog that had died the day before.”

Oh.

“A dog spirit?”

“He ran across new-fallen snow. There were no footprints.”

I stared at her.

“I knew you’d think it sounded crazy,” she said.

“No, no, not at all. Some people see Jesus, some see their Aunt Martha, you saw your, er, dead dog.”

“Exactly.”

She didn’t think too much about the vision for years. She married, raised three children and moved to Los Angeles, where a lot of people who have seen dog spirits finally settle. Then one day her cat stumbled into the house. It had been ripped up by a dog. (Not the same dog.)

“I just sat there staring at little Sheba,” Hammond said, “and I began visualizing the wound healing. As I watched, it actually did begin to heal! Then I held my hand above Sheba to complete the healing. That was 11 years ago.”

After that, she established the Amiya Institute, where she heals and teaches others how to heal. It can be learned, she explained, through dedication and hard work. She rejects any students who simply want to be spiritual dabblers.

“I don’t really cure people,” she added. “I channel cosmic energy into their body. If they’re really sick, I tell them to see a doctor first.”

Did I mention she sees colors? Auras tell her where various ailments are likely to be centered. For instance, she saw violet rays emanating from my head, just behind my eyes, as she demonstrated on me how she went about the diagnostic and healing process. I was afraid to ask her what they meant.

Hammond said that, although spiritual healing is based on the old “laying on of hands” (the way Burt Lancaster did it in “Elmer Gantry,” though not necessarily the way he did it to Jean Simmons), a healer does not actually have to touch someone to transmit the celestial force.

“Long-distance healing,” she added cheerfully, “is also a reality. We’re working on Ethiopia.”

Well, all right. I know better than to mock anything that might help Ethiopia. You can make fun of religion but God help the poor fool who needles what has become, by popular liberal acclaim, America’s Favorite Cause. There’ll be a different cause next month.

Raylah Hammond is a decent person who has raised three decent children, and who am I to say whether or not she is able to see auras and transmit cosmic energies? I hope she can and I hope she will someday be voted the Spiritual Healer’s Spiritual Healer.

But she’s going to have to do something about that dog-spirit story first.