Maybe this isn’t the best place to find a Pidgey (Photo by John Sonderman/DCist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
Few places are off-limits in the world of Pokémon Go. A man caught a Pidgey just as his wife was giving birth. A Magikarp was spotted at the 9/11 Memorial in NYC. And lots of players find themselves ending up in churches.
But there’s one place in D.C. that would really prefer Pokémon Go players to skip: the Holocaust Museum. There are actually three PokeStops inside the museum, according to the Washington Post.
“We feel playing ‘Pokémon Go’ in a memorial dedicated to the victims of Nazism is inappropriate,” Andrew Hollinger, the museum’s communications director, told Yahoo News.
A reporter from the Washington Post went live to the scene to see if she could catch anyone catching Pokémon. Sure enough, there were tourists who just couldn’t quit, even as they were exploring a museum that houses a haunting exhibit that includes shoes of victims and The Tower of Faces, which tells the story of a small Lithuanian town whose Jewish population was completely eradicated.
On Monday afternoon, there were plenty of people inside the museum who seemed to be distracted from its haunting exhibits as they tried to “catch ’em all.” A player even used a lure module, a beacon that attracts Pokemon to a specific PokeStop, on the museum’s marker — making double-headed bird-like creatures dubbed Doduos and rodent-like Rattatas practically swarm on users’ screens.
The player behind the lure, a 30-year-old visiting from North Carolina named Dustin who declined to share his last name with The Post for privacy reasons, was excited to catch a crustacean-like Krabby while waiting in the museum’s lobby with a group of friends to pick up tickets for a scheduled tour of the exhibits.
Perhaps the most disturbing if unsubstantiated report—given that this is a museum that has a model of the gas chambers and crematorium at Auschwitz—was that there was a sighting of a Pokémon called a Koffing. For the uninitiated, this is a creature that releases toxic gas. A screengrab popped up on Imgur but it was later deleted. The Post reporter couldn’t find the Koffing when she went looking. Hollinger did say that it was concerning and that the museum was asking to be deleted from the game.
Authorities with the National Mall and Memorial Parks are asking for players to be a little more sensitive around memorials: “Yes, it might be tempting to go after that Snorlax near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, or the Venusaur hanging out in the chamber of the Jefferson Memorial, but remember that there are places of solemn reflection here at the National Mall where playing Pokemon just isn’t appropriate.”
It sounds like some players need a little Elaine Benes-style shaming:
Millennial version of Seinfeld – Holocaust Museum to visitors: Please stop catching Pokemon https://t.co/xBjtxDDIC8 pic.twitter.com/P0iIsIBkro
— Matt Robinson (@robinsonmatt) July 12, 2016