Problem solved!!! Silly me... last night I was trying this and that - merging, copy & paste, import & export, etc...and then stumbled across the menu Document ---> Floor plan cut plane
Apprently my previous project (template) had the cutplane (offset) set higher than my new project's stories, and thus the problem of displaying the story above as ghosted.
I did play around w/ floor plane cut plane settings in the view map, but couldn't find the sort of thing in the project map at first.
ArchiCAD 25 & 24 USA
Windows 10 x64
Since ArchiCAD 9