By Stacy Jenel Smith

With the $15,000-to-make box office blockbuster "Paranormal Activity" scaring up the title of Most Profitable Film of All Time, you've got to know we're going to be in for more movies in which someone sets up camera and recording equipment and captures heretofore unseen entities from the spirit world.

Heck, Hollywood could do that without even having to leave its own soundstages.

As long as there've been soundstages, there've been stories of hauntings. This being Hollywood, many of those have been suspiciously timed to hit the media in time to promote a particular film or TV show. Yes, this means the industry has ghosts who cooperate with publicity campaigns! Some fright-ful tales do tend to stick with us, though, from productions present and past.

Jennifer Love Hewitt has often recounted the inexplicable occurrences that seem to regularly occur on the set of her series, "Ghost Whisperer." That's the drama Tyra Banks said puts the "super" in "supernatural" -- when the talk show hostess devoted an hour to it. Hewitt showed off video and still shots with odd balls of light and cloudy human forms in them to a gasping crowd.

Former cast mate Jay Mohr believes that the nature of the series invites such spectral guest stars.

"Absolutely, emphatically yes. No doubt about it," he told us. For example, "We were in a house in Alta Dena that had belonged to a hoarder. Every room had things piled up to the ceiling. I was getting ready to do a scene and there was a man behind me coughing, but when I turned around, there was a desk. That's all. But, when we started to shoot, the sound man kept having to stop us because he kept getting coughing. Little things like that happen pretty often.

"The first day I was on the set, Love was telling me, 'It's good to have you coming in as a guest star...' And, as I went to respond, a light behind me exploded. I don't mean burned out. I mean like something out of 'Mission Impossible: 3' shattering 40 feet away in tiny, tiny pieces. You watch footage and you see someone standing behind Love who wasn't there when we shot the scene. It happens over and over again, but only with her."

The series films at Universal Studios in California, a lot long said to have a haunted soundstage -- Stage 28, where Lon Chaney made "The Phantom of the Opera." The late horror star himself has been the subject of quite a few sighting claims through the years, so maybe he's been checking out Hewitt and company.

Last year, filmmaker Gus Van Sant caused a stir when he matter-of-factly noted that the spirit of slain San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk might have come in to check out filming of "Milk" while the team on the Sean Penn starrer was working in the storefront that once housed the camera shop owned by the gay rights leader.

"During a shot at night, there was a take where we were using most of the room and there were three or four actors in the scene. Some people were sitting on the sofa which was outside of the shot and during one of the takes, somebody walked in from outside and sat down on the sofa during the shot," Van Sant was quoted as saying.

"After the shot was over and I yelled 'Cut,' he apparently got up and walked out. The actors were like, 'Did you see that guy?' I didn't see anybody, but they kept describing Harvey, so I figure it was the ghost of Harvey walking into the store for a brief second."

Things were anything but matter-of-fact on the set of classic 70's horror flick, "The Exorcist." The film's director, William Friedkin, definitely believed in the existence of demons such as the one the film was portraying -- and had priests in not only as technical advisors, but to bless the set.

Still, he acknowledged in an online chat at the time of "The Exorcist's" 25th anniversary, "There were a great many unusual occurrences that I experienced during the making of this film that I had never experienced before, and hope to never experience again. For example, one morning, the set burned to the ground with no one in the studio, causing us to shut down for two months and rebuild the set. To this day, there is no explanation for why this occurred."

Ellen Burstyn has described everyone on the movie getting spooked by strange on-set accidents and the death of a night watchman. She suffered a spinal injury while shooting and Linda Blair injured her back when a piece of the rig broke as she was jostled on the bed. That, however, would seem to have had much more to do with the uniquely demanding physicality of making 'The Exorcist' than with anything supernatural.

The 1994 "The Crow" horror film started being viewed as cursed after star Brandon Lee died through a tragic mishap with a malfunctioning dummy bullet in a scene in which he was shot. Other "Crow" stories emerged -- the carpenter who was burned when the crane in which he was riding struck power lines; the inexplicable equipment truck fire and more.

"Poltergeist," "The Omen" ... the list is long of horror flicks to which accidents, fires, and untimely deaths have been attached.

And then, there's reality TV.

James Van Praagh, the famous psychic medium who co-created "Ghost Whisperer," is obviously quite used to talking about seeing dead people, sometimes famous ones. In his forthcoming E! Channel special, "Psychic Hollywood" (which was delayed from its originally-scheduled October air date), he and Alana Stewart get together and Stewart's good friend, the late Farrah Fawcett, joins them, to hear him tell it.

"I'd met Alana many years ago. I did the 'George & Alana Show,' maybe the first talk show I was ever on, and we got along really well. She reminded me that I'd done a reading for a friend of hers that was really accurate,' he recounts. He and Alana discussed trying to contact Farrah, and then, 'I asked her, 'Do you mind if I do it for my TV special?'"

One thing led to another, until, he says, the "Charlie's Angels" star's spirit showed up next to them poolside at the Hollywood Hills home where the special was shot. "She had a lot of nervous energy. She was excited. I thought she'd push me in the pool, she was so excited. She said great stuff about their relationship ... she wanted people to know there is life after death," claims Van Praagh.

He also lets us know, "She was upset her death didn't get the coverage that Michael Jackson's got."

And as far as Michael, "She said something interesting, that 'We're not in the same place. He's still in a place of rest.'"

So, there is that.