I'm not sure if this is related or not but I recently began the process of migrating my app to L5 and had an issue where Auth::User() was returning an instance of App\User while User::find(1) was returning an instance of User. I chose not to namespace my models. I found the problem was that in config/auth.php, the 'model' key was set to 'App\User'. I changed it to 'User' and my problem was solved.

Thank you. I found the problem. I have a user management feature where an administrator can create and update user accounts, including passwords. With this, I had a mutator method where I was hashing the password. This was causing users to have their password hashed twice.