can't delete because of constraint from zombie table

I'm finding a strange sort of 'zombie' table behavior.
I try to delete a row of a database that used to be referenced by a
table that has now been deleted.

I do
delete from staging_deal where staging_deal_id = 1
and get
ERROR: update or delete on "staging_deal" violates foreign key
constraint "staging_deal_fkey" on "staging_document"
DETAIL: Key (staging_deal_id)=(1) is still referenced from table
"staging_document".

I try to find that table
select * from staging_document
but
ERROR: relation "staging_document" does not exist

However pg_class does know that table
select * from pg_class where relname = 'staging_document'
gives me a row

The version is
"PostgreSQL 8.1.3 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 4.0.3"

I've tried reindexing pg_class, but the issue hasn't been solved.
Restarting Postgres doesn't help either.
On thing I tried in a test deployment was to delete the row from
pg_class, but I get
ERROR: could not open relation with OID 22427646
type errors, and it seems to leave me worse off.

Any ideas?

Thank you
Jaime

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