I keep getting random ghost volumes when I docker-compose up even though I have a volume named and configured

Every VOLUME declared in the Dockefile of an image (regardless wether you wrote it yourself, or pull a premade image from dockerhub) will result in an anonymous volume, when no volume is mapped against the declared target folder.

There is no problem in using docker-compose up -d to deploy or re-deploy a stack. While stop just stops the containers of the stack, down wil delete the containers of the stack.