Does you object have a lightmap? If not, the engine will try to bake lighting into the object's vertices. The verts will probably bake black since they are so close (or in) to the wall.
My thoughts on Normal Baking by with UV matching. Another post here in Polycount talked about the difficulty in baking perfect normal maps for models with low poly holes and tube shapes. But it didn't address an important alternative IMO. (I didn't see it in the wiki) A way I go about avoiding distortions is by matching…