Comment by adamkhrona

Just to add to this, the "special characters" are "%E2%80%AE" which is the escaped form of the UTF-8 "Right-To-Left Override" control character (which effectively reverses the display of text).

If you try copying the URL to plain-text, you'll see: http://www.kurlak.com/john/%E2%80%AElmth.ecruos