As of a few days ago I installed xscreensaver to try to set it up. Currently I have it disabled and the daemon not running. I believe the first time I had this issue Xscreensaver wasn't installed on the machine though.
I had forgotten caffeine was on. That is why I downloaded xscreensaver in the first place. I wanted to set it up so that pictures from a folder would be displayed statically for a few seconds, but since I couldn't get it to work the way I'd like, I turned it off (set mode to Disable Screen Saver) and that that would be it. Perhaps bc I still had "Lock Screen After" enabled, it still tried to lock the screen regardless of the mode... But I guess for that to have been the cause I must have had the daemon running.