Title: Phantom categories?
Last modified: August 19, 2016

---

# Phantom categories?

 *  [Rob Watson](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rcwatson/)
 * (@rcwatson)
 * [15 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/phantom-categories/)
 * I’ve discovered that in my WordPress there are some categories that were created
   on the Post Edit screen at the time the post was created, but that are not showing
   up in the Post Categories screen.
 * On the Post Categories screen, I should be seeing
 *     ```
       Announcements
          General Announcements
          Benefits and HR
          Head Honcho Announcements
             Business Area 1
             Business Area 2
             Business Area 3
             Business Area 4
       ```
   
 * but the last two (Business Area 3 and 4) are missing. When I try searching for
   them, WordPress says they don’t exist. Yet, when I try to create them and assign
   them to the parent/child relationship shown above, WordPress tells me they already
   exist.
 * The problem this is causing is when I try to use Category Templates to show an
   archive of posts for Business Area 3 or 4. I can discover the Category ID for
   each of these by viewing the source of the edit page and finding them in the 
   list of category checkboxes in the code. But creating a category-###.php page
   for each one yields no posts where many should be displayed as with the others.
 * Any ideas what I can do to fix this?
 * When I filter posts for those two categories, they do show up properly in the
   filter dropdown on Posts > Edit. And there are posts that have been assigned 
   to those two categories.
 * They’re just not showing up in the Post > Categories screen at all.
 * What’s wrong here? How do I fix it?

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  Thread Starter [Rob Watson](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rcwatson/)
 * (@rcwatson)
 * [15 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/phantom-categories/#post-1651778)
 * Any ideas? Anyone? 🙂

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘Phantom categories?’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [categories](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/categories/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 1 reply
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [Rob Watson](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rcwatson/)
 * Last activity: [15 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/phantom-categories/#post-1651778)
 * Status: not resolved

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