There is no need to explain away religious nut stories..... you can protect your children by keeping them away from faith fanatics .....I would praise an Atheist child for condemning alleged ghost stories as gibberish.... our Atheism is all about building upon our KNOWLEDGE regarding the pattern of religionists lunacies.... no need for a child to delve back into religious history after you already did years ago..
.as for any Atheist claiming their is evidence for ghosts how long b4 they start enabling believers claims their is evidence for alleged gawds ???? It is all bullshit and Atheist children are simply told the truth....religionS are like street drugs heroin cocaine meth ....can damage your brain or you can marry a believer who may rape you or slit your throat when they suffer a cult delusion

So lets go down a rabbit hole, I am an Atheist with a capital A, I'm also trained as a scientist and I like to think that my mental processes are logical. That said, I have seen and felt and experienced some shit over the past 60 years. These are things that absolutely do not fit in with my regular, everyday reality - the part of my life that makes up 99.99% of my life experience so far. So here it goes:

Spooky is the ghost that inhabits our family cottage, our cottage is the haunted house on the hill. Originally the cottage was built on the other side of the lake, it was dragged across the lake on logs by draft horses after a property dispute by two brothers who made their living guiding tourist on fishing and hunting trips. The eldest brother was engaged to the town belle but she had eyes for the younger brother and a triangle ensued which ended with a shooting death. Spooky watches over the cottage and protects it (sounds weird but while other cottages get broken into, nobody comes into our cottage) and I had a very strange experience with him one night when I had to pit stop at the cottage on the way home from Vermont to Toronto. Telepathic communication, unnatural drops in temperatures to the point that the fire I started in the fireplace admitted no heat, I put my hand into the flames and nothing, that sort of weird.
Spooky has a problem with blondes, his beloved was blonde and he has a habit of acting up, doors slamming insanely, hair brushes disappearing, strange temperature drops when Spooky shows up, imagine near freezing temps in the middle of the summer. That sort of thing.
There are other things that I have experienced personally over the years that I can't explain. I try to keep an open mind and these things are the .01 percent of what my life is about. I suppose that what I am trying to say is that we don't know everything and we can't explain everything but we must keep an open mind and hold up all evidence to the scientific method bu with the caveat that we may not yet have the ability to measure phenomena outside of our current level of understanding.

I think a lot of people like the idea of goolies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. If people like the idea of great grandma watching over them then it is hard to get them to look at evidence that shows something to the conertary. I used to belong to an amateur theater we had so it was said a few spirits wandering about the place. So some one got a psychic investigator in he wandered about back stage muttered and took some reading on something and came back amd said he felt a presance in few places. I went back stage with him and pointed out where he felt the presance. Oh you feel it to no i said its a draft from a missing door frame. One pice ot timber and a large hammer sorted that out. Oh what about the one in the kitchen that throws things of the fridge. A week later after a bit of head scratching we found out that the fridge was old rattled a lot when the motor kicked in and it was on a slight slope so when this happened and something slightly wet like a plat was put on the top it wouls slide to the floor. This was sorted and no more ghosts and one pissed off investigator. A year later someone decided to quote from the scotish play and geus what some claimed that there where spirits again and the play we where rehearsing was cursed.

This is one that happened to me personally.
It was 1992, I had just been through a tough divorce, and was broke and broken. I managed to scrape enough money together between bills and child support to make a down payment on a ragged mobile home and an overgrown piece of land.

Every day after work, I’d been going to the trailer and working to try and make it livable for my daughter and me. I finally got it to the point that I didn’t mind sleeping in it. It wasn’t much, but it was a roof over my head. It was a dark piece of property, with no street lights or outside lighting of any kind.

I was dog tired and could have slept on a rock. I did have a bed someone had given me, and I literally fell into it that night exhausted.

As soon as I laid my head on the pillow, I heard little footsteps trotting down the hall. My first thought was that my 5 year old daughter had gotten up and was coming to my room. My second thought was “wait, she’s at her mom’s tonight”. Then it got a little spooky. Intruders don’t step as lightly as little girls, so I was spooked and confused.

I got up and walked slowly down the hall, flipping light switches on as I went. When I got almost to the living room, the footsteps passed me going the opposite way. THEY WALKED RIGHT PAST ME! The scary part was, there was no one there, but there was no doubt about what I was hearing. I could even feel the rhythmic thumps through my bare feet. Then as I was standing in the middle of the living room, it walked right by me. I could imagine I was seeing this little person as it walked around me into the kitchen. I am a grown man, who doesn’t believe in afterlife but I was so spooked I jumped up onto the couch. I stood there as it walked around some more, and finally got silent.

I couldn’t explain it. I went back to bed and fell asleep, but was thinking about it when I got up the next morning. I talked to some people about it and finally found someone who knew a little about wildlife in abandoned structures, and he told me what it was likely to be. A little investigation on my part confirmed it.

Possums had gotten under the trailer. As much as I had worked on under the trailer trying to make it where I could live in it, I had never seen them. At night they would walk around under there and their stiff tails would thump against the cross members and sound exactly like someone walking around. I bought a live catch trap and managed to catch 7 possums over the course of several days. I hauled them away and released them miles away from the house.

I’ll never forget that first night sleeping there though.

Just take apart one religious/ supernatural claim now and again, so that they understand the methods and how it is done, say. "How should we decide about this." Then when they are ready they will have the skills, they need. Taking down the odd one, is not the same as telling them what to think, since there will always be plenty left.

The other thing, which I think works very well, is to widen their horizons by introducing them to the wonder of other things, especially science, nature, history and imaginative fiction. Not only does that give them alternatives, but when they realize that some of the things they have learned to love, are threatened by and at odds with religious/supernatural ideologies, they will understand what they stand to lose if they go down that route.

I was raised on the popular children's stories of the Greek Myths, and also great naturalists, explorers and scientists, not as hard science, but just as tales, often biographical, of wonder. I still get a warm tingle, when someone mentions Ant Lions or Mason Bees and my mind goes back to the imagined warmth of the South of France and the stories of the naturalist Fabre, or the German villages of Konrad Lorenz in King Solomons Ring. (Nothing about Solomon, just about a scientist who set out to understand the languages of animals.)

Read or google James Randi, who recently passed. His life was dedicated to disprove the supernatural.

You can not evoke an old soul!!!

Documentaries on evolution and cosmology.

I grew up believing the stories, but they didn't know about my Wednesday Adams side.
I had dug up verifiable translations of authentic Medieval grimoires, and learned a lot of ancient Latin.
When I was 14 I felt prepared.
I slipped out of the house about 11:00pm. and went to the graveyard that would have been visible from our house were a small ground change in altitude just blocked it all off.
I was there all night. I saw owls. I saw nothing supernatural.
I was deeply disappointed.
I felt foolish.
Everyone should.

Scooby Doo is the best. It's always the old white man trying to swindle someone.
Lol

While I cannot recommend any specific books or sources, I would encourage you to find a good biography of Harry Houdini, who during the height of his considerable fame, would take the time to debunk claims of spiritual activity in the cities he performed in as he traveled the country. Of course, every year Houdini would tell the world how he did his own magic, thereby discouraging copycats. He pissed a lot of people off, and was attacked in Montreal by someone who sucker-punched him hard enough to rupture his appendix. For decades afterward, his widow held a vigil on Halloween to see if Houdini would escape death, which of course he never did. Good stuff. In my opinion, a real American hero.

Here's a good place to start. [history.com]