I have a webserver that when you first load the page in any brower you get an ascii like characters. Once you reload it is fine unless you open it in a new tab. This happens on all browsers.

When you look at the code it is replacing this section:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="ImageToolbar" content="false" />
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="vxwfJngqcuxRLZV58ZE38_-_fgcEf3eCqy5aMIp8oGA" />
<meta name="viewport" id="viewport" content="width=device-width,minimum-scale=1.0,initial-scale=1.0" />

As well as some js and css below it.

It is running apache 2.4.6 behind haproxy.

outside of the head the body is fine, short of js functions not working correctly because they are not loaded.

Can anyone help me figure out why this is happening?

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Oddly when I go to the node directly bypassing haproxy the special characters are never there.

Is this a static page?

Is the indicated code at the beginning of the page? Perhaps post the first 10 lines or so of the document?

It is static header file on a dynamic page. It is the entirety of an included header, from start to finish. The header is being pulled from a drupal themes folder, but the location itself is not in drupal.

It is added like this:

<!--#include virtual="/sites/all/themes/lib_foundation/templates/includes/head.html" -->

Then my guess is that whatever is sending the page is not sending the requisite header...
...or since it works sometimes, not sending it consistently.
Note that the blank line following the Content-type is also required. That line is often coded in a cgi script as

Thank you for the reply. It is only an issue on the first load of the page, and always an issue on the first load of the page, once the browser has a cache it works fine.

You may try the mod_proxy_html and see if it helps in your case.

I am sorry but I miss your meaning. Haproxy does the proxying for the server, the header is accessible via the web through haproxy and on the back end to the server. Here is the interesting bit though, if you call the header file directly, outside of the<!--#include virtual=> tags it loads fine through the proxy server or locally every time, but once you add it to a php file, any php file (and only php files) it then decides to throw out all the special characters.

I was able to fix it, at least temporarily by deleting the httpd cache on the server. I am still not sure why I only saw the issue through haproxy but it is cleared for now. Time to just dig into the root cause.

I missed the haproxy stuff, sorry.
IIRC you should use the following syntax if you want to include a html file inside a php file:

Sounds a bit like like a corrupted cache entry.

yes there is a bug in apache that seems to be fixed in 2.5 that has a chance of corrupting SSI files when they are compressed.