How do I reclaim either deleted pages or their permalinks?

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If WordPress is appending an incremental number to the end of the permalink, that means that the original page still exists in the database. Several options:

  1. Try looking in the Trash.
  2. Try re-adding an administrator account with the same username, email, etc. as the one that was deleted.
  3. Go into the DB, using PHPMyAdmin, and change the post_author of the Pages in question to an existing username, in the wp_postmeta table.