delete all traces of podcasts

I have spent hours on the same ridiculous problem. Come on, the iPhone comes from generations of iPods and simple mp3 player functions are not working right at all! A side issue which compared to this is nothing is that I'll listen to a podcast and later on the iPhone will be telling me it is a new podcast that I have never listened to.
There have been posts on the issue of phantom podcasts showing up after deleting them posted here since June 09 - they have even been archived so no more responses are possible. I think it is about time Apple decides that having mp3 player function on their phone should mean having it actually work right.

I have the same exact problem and it's going to drive me to a mental institution

I can think of a couple of tricks that may or may not work. They are in no particular order.

1) Try re-subscribing to the offending podcasts and then properly unsubscribing using the button at the bottom of the podcast page in iTunes.

2) Trash you iTunes preferences. You should be able to find in in either the Library folder or the ~/Library folder. It's called, if I remember correctly, itunes.apple.com.plist. Trashing that will delete some of your settings (e.g. your preferred import settings). If you want to be really careful, just move it to the trash and see if that works.

3) Have you, through the finder, looked in your iTunes Media folder, in the Podcast folder to see if there's anything there?

Best of luck.

I downloaded something called "iphone explorer" which let me mount the iphone as a disk drive. I manually deleted the files (whose names show up as random strings of characters). I was able to identify the files by "date modified" and "file size". Wasn't fun but it worked

@Eric Rosenwald

I just deleted everything in the file-size ballpark, knowing that anything I wanted to keep I still had on my computer