Excel VBA - deleting sheet leaves phantom sheet object in object browser

So, I'm using a macro to automate a tedious data manipulation process on a large data set. As part of this I take a pre-existing calculated sheet, let's say "Output", and create a new sheet called "Output_Final" which will contain the updated data.

I check to see if "Output Final" exists, and if it does I delete and re-create it. This works fine in terms of physically replacing the actual sheet. However in the object browser I see a heap of phantom Sheet objects (apologies for the rubbish picture quality):

I'm deleting sheets using the following method, although the sheet name is parameterised:
ActiveWorkbook.Sheets("Output_Final").Delete

Am I missing something obvious? I'm still developing this solution so there will be a heap more test runs to do, and users will re-run frequently so I don't really want hundreds of phantom objects hanging around. Apart from anything else the initial default sheet name being generated increments each time and I don't know if there's a limit.

Solution

This can happen if the objects aren't fully released from memory. After deleting the sheet, explicitly set the sheet object to Nothing to release it from memory:

Dim ws As Worksheet
Set ws = ActiveWorkbook.Sheets("Output_Final")
ws.Delete
Set ws = Nothing