Welcome to Bakers Junction

Rusted iron gates with barbed wire don’t seem very inviting until you look at the stencil painted signs tacked onto them. One reads “Friendly People Welcome,” with the “N” in “friendly” written backwards.

There is also the brightly-colored Little Tikes children’s scooter by the dumpster with a sign above it reading what the place is and who inhabits it.

It’s called Bakers Junction. John and Cheryl Baker head a family of three girls, Crystal Starr, Amber Skye and Nova Raye Baker, as well as two grandsons, 5-year-old Dillan and 8-year-old AJ.

What is now Bakers Junction in Smithville, Ind., was an empty lot when Cheryl and her husband moved there in 1977. Soon after, John Baker began collecting old train cars that were slated to be destroyed.

Today, the Bakers’ property is a train graveyard. The rusty behemoths loom behind their small home and look foreboding enough without the additional creepy collectibles the Bakers have set up on the property, turning the string of train cars into a haunted maze that opens for business as the Halloween season nears.

The genuine friendliness of the family, however, is underestimated by outsiders because of the spooky surroundings. For Cheryl Baker, the rusted exterior of the trailer the family occupies and the shallow pool of baby doll parts serve as a way to screen out those who are unfriendly.

The Bakers’ “watch dog” Gomez, Cheryl Baker said, is a 3-year-old half Labrador retriever, half German shepherd mix who barks to alert the family of unwelcome visitors.

“I don’t let the super weird people on the deck if the dog don’t like them,” she said with a smile.

That’s an interesting sentiment coming from someone who admittedly is the “black sheep of the family.” Cheryl Baker knows she lives an unconventional lifestyle, and understands that some are skeptical while others are critical.

“We’re nice people,” she said in defense.  “I don’t care if people don’t like me because I’m not normal. People are so afraid to talk about things that haunt them or they experience because people think they’re crazy. I’m aware of that, and I don’t care what people think.”

Nova Raye Baker, who is 17 and attends Bloomington High School South, has been dodging the opinions of others throughout her time in school.

“I used to get teased real bad for my dad (John Baker),” she said. “People swore we were crazy for the longest time, and my friends didn’t want to come visit me.”
It wasn’t until her high school days that Nova Raye Baker said the ways her classmates treated her began to change.

“Now some of my friends think it’s cool when they find out my family runs a haunted train,” she said. “They come out scared and crying.”

Someone should’ve told that to the Herald Times reporter who visited Nova Raye Baker’s social studies class.

Nova Raye Baker and her mother said the reporter apparently remarked about some “crazy old man south of here (Bloomington) who cut off his finger and put in on eBay.”
About that finger – John Baker said in a nonchalant tone that he cut if off from his right hand while sawing a board above his head in one of the haunted train cars. It has since been mummified and put on a key ring.

And it is being sold on EBay, Cheryl Baker confirmed, because, well, “the family business could use the extra money.”

Cheryl Baker said she understands that people are curious about them.
“This girl who was beyond drunk stumbled out of the haunted train once and asked if John cut off his finger on purpose, and I was like ‘No, why would he do that?’” she said. “The things people tend to think are just unreal. Like, who would ever do
something like that intentionally?”

But most things about the Bakers aren’t simple results of happenstance.
Cheryl Baker said most of the knickknacks in the family home come from her father, who she described as a giant pack rat. The items adorning the house include an American flag torpedo that serves as a piggy bank, an old stained glass window from a church up the street and a skull with eyeballs in the sockets.

Cheryl and Nova Raye Baker both claim to have experienced the presence of ghostly apparitions.

Cheryl Baker remembers a time when she was out at an antique shop in Kentucky about 10 to 15 years ago.

“I was looking in a mirror, and I saw a girl in old-fashioned colonial dress,” she said. “I swore I was doing drugs. Then she followed us home, and a random tombstone was with us. It’s sounds so much crazier out loud.”

Nova Raye Baker said she sleeps with a nightlight on because of it, but the few times she hasn’t, a girl in a sailor costume has visited her room at night, wanting to play.
Cheryl Baker doesn’t like to be scared herself, but, she admitted, it’s fun to scare her daughters.

Nova Raye’s favorite urban legend concerns her father. Nova Raye said when she was younger, her mother used to tell her sisters that John Baker used to murder people and stuff them in the old train cars behind the trailer they inhabit.

“It’s a joke,” she said, as an eerie silence befell the room, which was broken by the entrance of John Baker, whose nearly seven-foot-tall shadow loomed in the doorway.
The Bakers know they aren’t normal, and they don’t try to be.

When home alone, they may knock each other out with frozen turkeys and watch horror movies until they are desensitized, but their “normal” is much different from everyone else’s.

“How do you define normal?” Cheryl Baker said. “This isn’t the ’50s, and I ain’t no June Cleaver. That ain’t normal. These days, we say what we wanna say, and we cook our own meals.”