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Not exactly a ghost story but...
A long time ago in a major city, there was a group of perhaps a dozen scientists who worked with kids. They all were noticing that it was not unusual for kids to report experiences of things commonly termed 'psychic' or 'paranormal' - all of them had kids in their cohorts that had been identified as doing this. The two most common things were very vivid and over-detailed reports of past lives, and what is caled 'remote viewing' - the sense that you can leave your body and travel elsewhere and see what is happening.
Many of these remote viewing reports had details that would have been considered 'proof' that they were real in today's internet (i.e. kids reporting real events that there was no plausible way they could have known otherwise, or things they were too young to even understand). But being scientists, they were pretty skeptical and really more interested in sussing out how it worked via non-paranormal abilities. So they were bored and tipsy at a conference and they spent the evening setting up a theoretical empirical test to reallly eliminate the alternative non-parapsychological explanations; this required a theoretical way to eliminate the possibility of any covert messaging or surveillance, a situation that is so hard to achieve that it was sort of imaginary.
Now in that big metro city there happened to be a really high tech research lab where they had a totally sealed room/chamber - massively shielded so that it had essentially zero outside RFI/EMF or any transmission signal, noise, or vibration AND the ability to instrumate it to completely record what was happening. And totally secure from anybody being able to rig it for surveillance covertly. IIRC it was for doing super refined physics and microchip experiments. Time in this chamber cost thousands per hour (in wayback dollars, so add a zero or two today). I'm sure it was just a coincidence, but such a chamber would be perfect for this kind of an experiment. It also just happened that some of these scientists were privy to insider info, and learned that a big corporation had just cancelled a few days of chamber time last minute. Somehow there was a 'messaging error' and the admin sort of neglected to fill those times with other paying customers. The scientist got on the phone real quick with thier buddies, and basically said 'lets do that study, I've got the perfect location'.
Amongst them they rounded up almost 2 doxen kids considered highly suspect for the ability (more than one plausible story/report). They ran a remote viewing experiment that was elaborately double-blinded (actually more like quadruple-blinded); the people getting the kids responses had absolutely no idea what was going to be going on inside the tank, and those in the tank did not know who was trying to view, or even specifically when each kid was trying (conventional studies usually use a fixed/known set of objects or images which really reduces the statistical difficulty - i.e. guessing card suite is a 25% chance, what card it is becomes about a 2% chance, but 'what do I have in my hand?' becomes almost infintely difficult). I won't belabour all the details, but this was basically the best study that a very talented group could put together, with appropriate statistical analysis on the results.
Results of this were that a subgroup of the kids - about 80% IIRC, were able to demonstrate repeatable performances that were statistically significant at better than the .01 level (less than 1% chance it could have been chance results). All but 2 of the kids did statistically better than chance. Several of the kids were so strikingly accurate that the group swapped experimenters for a second round and added more detailed material to the viewing task, without sugstantially decreasing accuracy.
Punch line: they all decided that they better keep this to themselves, that submitting this for publication or replication would only get them blackballed for being 'crackpots' and no more grant funding for any of them. And, amongst the small subgroup of kids w/ known history, they all grew out of it before puberty (but there was one kid that wasn't particularly believable in that).
Now about those past life memories - the people who tell me they were somebody real famous get my instant BS response, as does anything that happens at a 'psychic fair', but when it is an unremarkable day-to-day life described in vivid detail by a very young, uneducated kid it does make you wonder. No way to really guarantee that a kid didn't hear something that they subconsciously file away and bring out later, especially now that the internet has so much. But one that stuck out to me comes from back when the internet required a phone modem. This was a 5th grader who told one out of the blue about a past life as a farmer that involved him taking on a very wierd accent (Irish brogue, and he was inner city AA) and using a term for a piece of horse tack that I thought was made up until I was able to find s/b several years later at one of those historical villiages who knew 18th century farm gear. Quite a few others, but none with that level of obscure detail.
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