Too many internal dummy connections to Apache

I can’t figure out why my wordpress install is going crazy. There are 4,000 times more visits from WordPress itself than from the next top visitor. I have done a new reinstall. All I kept was the wp-config.php file and .htaccess, and I deleted everything else. I have zero plugins active, and no themes or plugins added. I’m using the default theme. The only thing I’ve changed over the months is to upgrade WordPress. Feb and March is when it really started going crazy.

Here are my log files (I’ll update them every once in a while since the generated ones are password protected) —
https://www.mrheyer.com/temp/stats.htm
https://www.mrheyer.com/temp/longterm.html

The only other thing that might matter (though I’ve always had it) is I have a SSL cert I use to access wp-admin.

Here’s the .htaccess file’s contents:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(stats|failed_auth\.html).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule . - [L]
</IfModule>
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

The extra lines are so I can get to my stats directory.