Mary Ann Winkowski loves her strolls about Hollywood's film lots. On any given visit to the set of CTV's "Ghost Whisperer" she'll wave to stagehands, chat with actors or chew the fat with script girls and stuntmen - nothing out of the ordinary except in every instance these people are dead.

Before the hit show aired in 2005, Winkowski was enlisted by producer John Gray to help his writers and star Jennifer Love Hewitt get a handle on portraying a woman who can communicate with the dead - something she's been doing since her grandmother dragged her to funerals as a young child.

"Going to Hollywood to work on the show was such an experience. But to see these old-time stars and stage people around who've passed on. That doesn't happen to me everyday. I'm from Ohio," she laughs.

Hollywood gossip is old school

From Shemp Howard, one of the "Three Stooges," to screen legend Barbara Stanwyck, Winkowski sees this Hollywood chitchat as nothing new.

"Frankly, I was surprised at how big a crowd there is on these sets," says Winkowski, the author of the new book "When Ghosts Speak" (Grand Central/H.B. Fenn and Company).

She recalls one encounter with an old Hollywood dentist in the show's makeup trailer. Describing him as one of the first dentists in Tinseltown to whiten movie star smiles, Winkowski says, "He watched one of the actresses get prepped, looked at her teeth and said 'Someone's done a lousy job. I could have done better.'"

Winkowski's brush with Stanwyck - the star of Hollywood classics like "Meet John Doe" (1941) and "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948) - wasn't filled with dead air either. It produced a conversation, so Winkowski says, that was downright spirited.

"Acting is such a young person's area today," she sighs. "When I saw Barbara and told the young people accompanying me who I'd spotted, they didn't know who she was. She was insulted. I was flabbergasted. I offered to help her into the light, but she didn't want to go. She still wanted to hang around the studio. It's where she'd spent most of her life."

Hopeful that her stint in Hollywood will lead her to the set of "Gone with the Wind," "Mutiny on the Bounty" or one of Errol Flynn swashbucklers, Winkowski says, "I wish I could call Elvis. But I can't do that. The dead find me and once they do it's like putting a penny in their ear. They haven't talked to anyone for decades so they just won't stop."

Winkowski says new book does justice to the dead in and out of Hollywood

"When I started working on the show I'd get these scripts. I'd sit there with a big red marker saying no, no, no! The dead aren't nuts. They're not creepy or ugly or scary. That's how the writers were portraying them even after my discussions with them."

Frustrated, Winkowski would turn on early episodes and see the show's depiction of dead as dead wrong.

Finally, after calling producer Gray to get this dirt on the dead settled, Winkowski was told, "This is not a documentary, this is entertainment. If you want to get the facts out there write a book."

Now having done so, Winkowski says, "I have people from high school calling to say I didn't know. But how could they? I kept it such a secret."

"The times we live in have changed so much," she laughs. "If you went to a party 15 years ago and said 'I have ghost in my house' people would think you were nuts. Now you say the same thing at a cocktail party and people want to compare notes on who's got the best haunting."