Ghost process after running PhantomJS

Spooky !

Short term solution

$> ps -ef | grep phantom | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

Better long-term solution

Using driver.quit() :

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS(service_args=['--ignore-ssl-errors=true', '--ssl-protocol=any'])
driver.get('https://' + str(host) + '/')
...
driver.quit()

What if you use .quit() but still see them hanging around?

There is a bug affecting versions around 1.9.8 where there is no cleanup going on. The solution is to upgrade to PhantomJS 2.0.0 or more recent. See this github issue.