Hey Liza
Sorry to hear about your troubles with the attendees. I’d love to help you get this sorted, because what you wrote is definitely not what should be happening.
As a first, please make sure that your WordPress and all your plugins – or at least the calendar and ticketing plugins – are updated to the latest version. We recommend using a staging site to test the changes before updating on a live site.
I would also like to ask you to share your full system information with me in a private reply, after the plugins have been updated.
Are you using WooCommerce or the built-in Tribe Commerce to sell tickets?
In case the latter, please make sure that you have set up the plugin and PayPal correctly. Here is our user guide for that.
Once the above is done we can continue digging into this.
Cheers,
Andras