3 Correct answers
Select All (Command+A) ---> click on random object ---> then click on random area outside the artboard
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ok so the same thing was happening to me and yes sometimes it's clipping masks that you're not seeing and most of these answers will help you with that, thank you guys so much
BUTTTTTTTT, HEAR ME OUTTTTT
GUIDE LINES PEOPLE!!! I was going insane with the crazy amount of things my file was selecting. Command+A would select things even OUTSIDE the grey area where you can put artworks, which... HOW?!
I copied some of the elements i wanted and copied them to a whole new file and it showed some lines tha
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I have also just had this issue in what appears now to be an 8-year-old issue.
(I'm no Illustrator expert btw).
I solved it... through luck.
In my case, the box was linked (somehow) to a 2-letter text box which I had moved to another layer and then hidden. Somehow this 'shadow' from the text box was left behind. I didn't see a clipping mask in the layers box. When I selected it (or more normally I selected 'off' a different object) this item was left behind.
My suggestion is therefore:
Select EVERYT
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Most likley you have a clipping mask selected. Use your layers and appearance palette to help deteremine what you have selected.
Eiditng masks got to be cumbersome since they changed how masks work in CS5, and suspect that is what is giving you trouble. To edit the contents of a mask, you need to click on the 2nd icon below (circle with a dot in the middle), and also using selection targets in the layers palette (the round buttons left of the blue squares on my first screenshot)
If you are on the mac and a Shift CMD 4 fails to capture what you need, you can instead use Shift CMD 3 to shoot the entire screen, or in utilities there is grab which can do a timed screenshot.
Try to copy your selection, paste into a new document to see what appears.
If some made an opacity mask in the tranparency palette, that also can do something similar, if the opacity mask square(one on the right) was left selected last.
Ok, here is the first screen shot I've been able to get.
I know you can't see much at the full screen here since it's too small, so here's a closer look:
You can see above that the text box upper left is selected. That's the one I clicked on. Its edges are visible, and it's shown as selected in the layers panel. However the bounding box is much larger, yet no object it goes around has edges showing. Here are some zoom-ins of the same screen:
This last one shows that the bounding box seems to go around this text box ("webcast series"), yet it's not truly selected. This box has nothing to do with the one I actually clicked on, and moreover, no matter what I clicked on, the bounding box would wrap around this too.
So, I did what I always do, and grabbed a handle and dragged. It resized BOTH my "science of relevance" text box and the "webcast series." When I hit release the handle, then undo, everything goes back to normal, and I can click on any other object again without it selecting the ghost object. They go back to being perfectly unrelated to each other.
So weird!
I've had this same problem, on and off, since CS3 (though not yet with CS6). Sometimes in quite simple files; a box with some text, no clipping masks, and where nothing in the file has ever bee in the area where the box suddenly appears (usually off the artboard).
My usual way of dealing with it (found quite by accident), is to select anything else in the file, click it one more time to 'anchor' it, then use any of the align tools (see below). The anchored object doesn't move, and, nine times out of ten, the box is gone. For that persistent tenth time, I have been simply closing and reopening the file (that always cures it), but next time I will try your trick.
Hoping someone will eventually figure out where this ghost comes from, -- OB
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