They are called ghost wicks and are a long standing problem here. Creating and cutlisting is indeed the normal fix.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Will keep that in mind for when I run into it in the future
I thought the create/cutlist fix had been stopped for Google reasons. Is it back on the table again?
Septimus advised me to post here something I've recently found, as you might find it interesting.
Her we go: while moving an index to the Administrivia/ namespace, I accidentally misnamed the page name. While waiting for it to be deleted, I've experimented a bit: blanking the page or just editing it with text leave ghost wicks for all the pages that were listed, even after a couple edits.
However, after I edited the page again to give it an actual link (toward the Wiki Sandbox, but that's irrelevant), then all the previous ghosts wicks disappeared for good.
So, apparently, it's the act of modifying the links which get rid of ghost wicks, but not merely editing the page.
One of my little pet projects on the Wiki is moving Japanese-named series to their official English titles when available. The last couple I did have had an odd detail come up.
When moving wicks I came across a few that went to a page that didn't exist. That is, you see the page listed in the "related to" section, but click on the link and you get the page stating "Inexact title. See the list below. We don't have an article named ______, exactly. We do have:" and it lists the Namespaces that do exist.
Both of the remaining wicks here have this issue: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/relatedsearch.php?term=LightNovel/OreNoImoutoGaKonnaNiKawaiiWakeGaNai
The one on this link https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/relatedsearch.php?term=LightNovel/DenpaOnnaToSeishunOtoko
did have it for the Mai Fuchigami wick. In an effort to correct it, I attempted to null edit the page to see if that would clear things up but, in that case, I think I ended up creating the page instead. I went ahead and submitted a cut request for that one. That may even clear it up, who knows.
Don't know here else an issue like this has cropped up but wanted to report it and maybe learn of a workaround or fix.