Thanks for the reply Jennifer 
I’m quite happy with the stage tracker on the deal object.
It’s when i’m trying to use the stage tracker to track custom lifecycle stages on the contact or company object that i’m seeing the “phantom/ghost” stage called “closed stage” at the end of the visual representation that the stage tracker provides on those objects.
I’ve created a dev environment to test the default settings (without custom lifecycle stages) and it looks like the “closed stage” visualisation on those is related to the standard lifecycle stage “other”, which we don’t want to use.
I’m wondering if this changable so that we don’t visually represent a lifecycle stage on the trackers that does not exist?
I’ve removed the stage trackers from contact and company records for now but it would be a very desirable feature if it visualised the way i was expecting it to.
Any further knowledge on the contact and company stage trackers in this thread would be welcome 