"Funny characters" are generaly control characters, in this case the $^foo family of vars. You're seeing $^H as it really is, Control-H, also known as backspace or "". (If you zoom up your font size a bit, you should see that as a block with a circular hole in the middle (reversed bullet), not a "no such character" glyph.) $^H, as perlvar will tell you, gives the hints to the compiler for things like strict and warnings. You're also seeing $^R and $^X -- apparenly the other control-character vars aren't package vars in Main.

Oh, my test script: perl -le "foreach (keys %::) {print qq{$_ -- \\c}.chr(ord($_)+64)}" > foo.txt. Oh, and the \cX is only valid where X is a capital letter. I was too lazy to test for that myself.