Day 2 begins! Day 1 notes here
https://technonaturalist.net/blog/2011/01/drupal-7-notes-dealing-ghost-fields
https://technonaturalist.net/comment/reply/43/1223 -- Comment from Jen Lampton Nov 2013 Running cron once doesn’t always do the trick. If it doesn’t work the first time, you may need to run cron 10 or 20 times to get the fields to actually be deleted. Its faster to just manually delete the two tables (field_data and field_revision) as well as the two records from field_instance and field_instance_config. Still not resolved as of the latest version of D7.
https://drupal.org/comment/5865292#comment-5865292
- Delete the records from field_config / field_config_instance
This is what's crazy. I just grabbed the latest stage db and now there are no field_deleted tables present. This is while drush updb is runnig but I haven't answered yes yet. This is where I seem to be magically manipulating the database on staging by doing all this stuff locally.