Stuck in Maintenance Mode

I deactivated wt3-total-cache and now my blog is stuck in maintenance mode. I can not even access the dashboard.

I have tried deleting the .maintenance file via ftp using Filezilla as suggested from other posts, but the file does not exist. And, yes I checked “force showing hidden files” under the server tab and it doesn’t show up. Is there a plugin that may be executing maintenance mode instead of WordPress itself?

I tried re-naming the w3-total-cache folder too, and that doesn’t work either.

What else can I try to fix this? thank you