mystery p tag

why is wordpress generating paragraph tags when i insert html into pages?

on my home page within these elements there are empty <p> under each div that are being generated by wordpress and not my programming.

div class="entry-content">
<div id="mid-content">
<p></p>
<div class="container marketing">
<p></p>
<div id="map">
<p></p>

this is causing a problem primarily on the last div containing the google map. i want that to sit flush with the footer but because of the <p> there is a line break. how do i stop this from happening?

thanks