TextFieldParser readfields producing unicode instead of expected values

Question

I've got a function that takes in stream from Excel (of type .xls) and parse into the fields as per the columns:

    public static List<DancerTest> ParseTestsFromString(Stream stream, string filename, char delimiter = '\t')
    {
        List<DancerTest> results = new List<DancerTest>();
        using (TextFieldParser parser = new TextFieldParser(stream))
        {
            parser.TextFieldType = FieldType.Delimited;
            parser.SetDelimiters(delimiter.ToString());
            parser.HasFieldsEnclosedInQuotes = true;
            if (parser.EndOfData)
            {
                throw new Exception("No data found in file.");
            }

            int i = 0;
            while (!parser.EndOfData)
            {
                i++;
                //Process row
                string[] fields = parser.ReadFields(); // Getting unicode output somehow, which is not expected
            }
        }

        return results;
    }

In my unit test, I have got the following:

        // Arrange
        var fullPathToFile = Path.GetFullPath(@"Utilities\file.xls");

        var bytes = File.ReadAllBytes(fullPathToFile);
        var memoryStream = new MemoryStream(bytes);

        // Act
        var parseOutput = DancerTestParser.ParseTestsFromString(memoryStream, "Testing");

        // Assert
        // To continue

In the ReadFields() line, instead of 15 fields being produced, I am seeing only three, where they look like unicode:

The encoding of the excel file is Western European, so I tried the but to no avail:

using (TextFieldParser parser = new TextFieldParser(stream, Encoding.GetEncoding(1252)))