Random letters scattered all over artboard

I'm on Illustrator 27.7. I noticed unwanted letters randomly getting spilled all over my artboard. Like alphabet soup but without the soup. I can't click on them or edit them, as if they were locked items, but they don't show up in the Layers. But if I toggle visibility for certain layers, these unwanted letters will toggle with it. And if they actually happen to be in the artboard, they will show up in the export.

A temporary fix I do is to cut an entire layer and then paste in place, but that's pretty annoying.