I have some special characters in my database, but when they are viewed on the results page, they display the question mark.

Via phpMyAdmin, the special character displays properly (Dornröschen), however, via the results, its not displaying.

Any idea if this is php or apache causing this? Would I need to use something like mod_rewrite?

good: Dornröschen
bad: Dornr�schen

Maybe you need to specify the character encoding via either an .htaccess or as a meta tag in the page being output?

Using a PHP header or htacess does nothing, neither does adjusting the AddDefaultCharset setting in httpd.conf using UTF-8.

Any other ideas?

Try setting the AddDefaultCharset directive in your httpd.conf to off, ie:

AddDefaultCharset off

Setting it to anything else forces the specificed character set. Setting it to off allows you to specify the encoding via the actual web page.