Why are my Gmail contacts appearing in Contact List searches but nowhere else?

[AC Question]

Gmail contacts appearing in Contact List searches but nowhere else

I've got a Samsung Galaxy S4 running Lollipop, just upgraded a month or two ago.

It's linked to TWO Google accounts:
1. one is my main Account A (which has Contacts syncing OFF)
2. the other (Account B) which I use to sync my contacts list.

When I view ALL my contacts, I can only see the Account B contacts (which is what I want.) But when I start searching for someone, all of a sudden I get all these e-mail addresses saying they're from Account A, which is annoying because it has hundreds of people and it takes me longer to find a match, and I've accidentally clicked on someone else's details on multiple occasions.

So far I've tried:
- removing all syncing from Account A (emails would still appear though when searching in Contacts)
- changing "Contacts to Display" to Account B only (but this is weird, because even when it's set to display all, the e-mails from Account A don't show up anyway)
- clearing app data from Contacts & Gmail
- tried removing the e-mails from Google Contacts, but it only shows me a few people, and when I delete them it removes them from my Google Plus account, which I don't want

What do I do?? At my wits end...