Mongo db.stats shows that collections exist, but show collections returns empty

Question

I have a mongodb running on server:27017.

From a different machine, I installed mongo-client and connected to mongodb running on server.

I have three dbs in mongo: admin, local, and template (these were created for me by a script).

When I do:

use template
db.stats()

I get:

db.stats()
{
        "db" : "template",
        "collections" : 2,
        "views" : 0,
        "objects" : 1001,
        "avgObjSize" : 565.1118881118881,
        "dataSize" : 565677,
        "storageSize" : 110592,
        "numExtents" : 0,
        "indexes" : 5,
        "indexSize" : 86016,
}

If, however, I do

show collections

or

db.getCollectionNames()

I get nothing.

What does this mean? Why is there a DB with indexes and objects, but no collections, and why does the count of collections in template db >0, but show collections gives nothing back?