By Cole Claybourn of the Courier and Press

Pokémon GO is taking the world by storm — so much so that it's even affecting Evansville's dead.

The mobile phone game, based on the original Gameboy titles, card game and television show that debuted in the 1990s, is drawing crowds to all sorts of places, including Evansville's Oak Hill Cemetery.

"There was traffic in here like I hadn't seen since Memorial Day weekend," said Chris Cooke, superintendant of city cemeteries, of the weekend traffic at Oak Hill. "At 9:30 at night with all the storm damage we've had, that's just unacceptable."

The GPS-based game draws players to locations across town — businesses, restaurants, parks — to either catch Pokémon, gather loot or take over "gyms" — a place where Pokémon players can compete against each other.

It's taken the country by storm since its debut Thursday and is so popular that it could surpass Twitter in daily active users on Android-powered phones.

The "GO" part in the game's title means that users must walk (or drive) to certain locations to gather goods from "PokéStops." Users select a team once they reach a certain level, and the objective is to either take over gyms claimed by other teams or help defend their own gyms. The player has to be at a specific location to do either of those.

The idea is to encourage users to travel around the real world to catch Pokémon in the game, and will enable your phone's camera to show a digital Pokémon using augmented reality.

There are 26 PokéStops and three gyms located inside Oak Hill Cemetery, far more than any other concentrated area in the city.

Cooke received a call over the weekend from a neighboring business about the massive amount of traffic at the cemetery and arrived to see people driving in alleyways around damage from last week's storms and on grassy areas near graves.

"That's when I really got kind of perturbed," Cooke said. "It took me about an hour-and-a-half to clear the cemetery and I ended up requesting the police department shut the gates until we can get ahead of it with some information."

Monday afternoon, the City of Evansville announced on Twitter that it's closing the gates to the cemetery at dark "until further notice" due to storm damage.

Players of the game also have been wandering Angel Mounds State Historic Site near Evansville, where site manager Mike Linderman said it's actually been a financial plus so far.

Linderman said eager players paid admission fees this weekend to come look for Pokémon.

For adults, the game's success is likely due in large part to nostalgia. But police across the country are cautioning players to be safe about the activity. One Wyoming teen discovered a dead body while searching for a Pokémon. Outside of St. Louis, a group of robbers used an in-game tool to lure victims to a secluded location.

"This is an issue where I'm sure we're not the only ones having this today," Cooke said. "From talking with dispatch, apparently they were getting a lot of calls over the weekend with people being unsafe. It's mainly a safety issue. You're not supposed to be in here at night because it's not safe ... What people don't realize is they could be in here at night and just see trees on the ground but they're not able to see what's up. There's stuff that's hanging and it could fall at any time."

According to a report from comicbook.com, the game's software developer, Niantic, used crowdsourcing from its first augmented reality game, Ingress, to determine locations for PokéStops and gyms. Cooke, who also had similar problems with Ingress, said it was "irresponsible and unfortunate" that Niantic placed so many locations in a cemetery and he contacted them on Monday to report the issue.

Cooke hadn't heard back as of Monday afternoon and Niantic didn't immediately respond to the Courier & Press' request for comment.

Cooke said he hopes a solution will come from his request.

"Either limit the number or come up with something so that this isn't an issue," he said.