Why am I getting back this value, {} from bit field

I am getting back the following values from my SQL 2000 db, embedded within the properties of my custom objects: {}

The value is not a string. It is returned from fields that are null. The data type is bit. I suppose the easy thing to do would be to do a bulk update on the bit field and make everything 0/false but why would it return {} instead of false?
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