diff --git a/scrapy/tests/test_utils_markup.py b/scrapy/tests/test_utils_markup.py
index 95fb2a50b..5c2c7df32 100644
--- a/scrapy/tests/test_utils_markup.py
+++ b/scrapy/tests/test_utils_markup.py
@@ -30,6 +30,8 @@ class UtilsMarkupTest(unittest.TestCase):
                          u'a < b  c  six')
         self.assertEqual(remove_entities('x&#x2264;y'), u'x\u2264y')
 
+        # check browser hack for numeric character references in the 80-9F range
+        self.assertEqual(remove_entities('x&#153;y', encoding='cp1252'), u'x\u2122y')
 
     def test_replace_tags(self):
         # make sure it always return uncode
diff --git a/scrapy/utils/markup.py b/scrapy/utils/markup.py
index eb7ec5ca0..c978628ed 100644
--- a/scrapy/utils/markup.py
+++ b/scrapy/utils/markup.py
@@ -37,6 +37,12 @@ def remove_entities(text, keep=(), remove_illegal=True, encoding='utf-8'):
                     number = int(entity_body, 16)
                 else:
                     number = int(entity_body, 10)
+                # Numeric character references in the 80-9F range are typically
+                # interpreted by browsers as representing the characters mapped
+                # to bytes 80-9F in the Windows-1252 encoding. For more info
+                # see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encodings_in_HTML
+                if 0x80 <= number <= 0x9f:
+                    return chr(number).decode('cp1252')
             except ValueError:
                 number = None
         else: