Thanks for your testing here. It's generally a good idea to have some kind of text formatter on your text fields, because otherwise they are unfiltered (could contain HTML, etc.). So I usually add an entities text formatter to fields like a phone number. I would be curious to know if actually adding a text formatter to it (like entities) produces any change.
In your code where you are examining the value with var_dump(), is there anything that occurs before it? Or is this at the very top of your template file?
Do you have any modules installed in your /site/modules/ dir?
Thanks,
Ryan