Not 100% sure this is the reason but every single time it happened to me, it seemed I was looking at the mob spawning or spawning into the world myself. This ghost mob is a duplicate of a real mob, shows only client side and gets fixed with relogging.
This ghost model doesn't move and can't be walked into by the player, who gets pushed off from it. Sometimes hitting the ghost model with a sword can kill the actual mob it is a duplicate of.
Mobs that i can confirm suffer from this: Abyssal Snails, Splitjaws, Kuongatari, Makihige, Squidfly (probably at this point is something that happens to all mobs)