My bet is you are having the issue I did. The harness insulation has failed and the main hot coming through the bulkhead has melted into other circuits and is energizing them.
I strongly suggest a VERY close inspection of the dash harness..
This can be expanded into "any previous short" where a fuse didn't blow right away, or a too-big fuse installed, or just one of the circuits which was never properly fused.
In other words a wire gets hot, melts part of the harness together, and "weird things" happen.
Another thing you could do is "get into" the fuse panel at the inst fuse. One by one, separate the orange wires from each other. At some point "one" of them will stop the rest of the dash lights. Get it down to "which" of those one orange wires is involved with the short. See if you can live without those lamps. Say it's the radio lamp. If not, you are going to be pulling the dash harness out.