Cole Claybourn

Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press

EVANSVILLE, Ind. — Pokémon GO is sending players to a cemetery — and that's not OK with the man in charge.

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.

Android phone owners have downloaded it more times than dating app Tinder, and it's poised to have more daily Android users than Twitter, according to SimilarWeb, which tracks apps in the Google Play Store. As of Saturday, it was ranked No. 1 in both the Google and Apple App stores.

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

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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.

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 the app enables your phone's camera to show a digital Pokémon using augmented reality.

Police, agencies issue 'Pokémon Go' warnings

Inside Oak Hill Cemetery are 26 PokéStops and three gyms, far more concentrated than any other area of this southwest Indiana city of about 120,000 people.

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."

Police, agencies issue 'Pokémon Go' warnings

By Monday afternoon, the City of Evansville announced on Twitter that it was closing the gates to the cemetery at dark until further notice because of storm damage.

Players of the game also have been wandering Angel Mounds State Historic Site near Evansville, where site manager Mike Linderman said the game has been a plus so far because eager players paid admission fees over the weekend to look for Pokémon.

For adults, the game's success likely in large part comes from nostalgia. But police across the country are cautioning players to be safe: 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.

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"From talking with dispatch, apparently they were getting a lot of calls over the weekend with people being unsafe," Cooke said. "It's mainly a safety issue. You're not supposed to be in here at night because it's not safe."

The game's software developer, Niantic, used crowdsourcing from its first augmented reality game, Ingress, to determine locations for PokéStops and gyms, according to a report from comicbook.com.

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 Monday to report the issue. (Urban cemeteries, public memorials and monuments are often PokéStops or gyms, comicbook.com said.)

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Cooke had not received a reply late Monday, and Niantic didn't respond to a request for comment.

But Cooke had a message for players: Don't mess with the graves and don't get hurt.

And a message for the game's developers: "Either limit the number, or come up with something so that this isn't an issue," he said.

Follow Cole Claybourn on Twitter: @ColeClaybourn