Please Don’t Catch Pokemon at the Holocaust Museum, Kids

(Totally appropriate Pokemon photo not taken at a Holocaust Museum by Instagram/hopekeanki)

Pokemon Go is totally awesome. One of the most fun things about it is seeing all the cool and interesting places one can catch a Pokemon. People using the game in AR mode can catch photos of their Pokemon superimposed over the real world. Mostly that is fun–like when I caught an Eevee on top of my sleeping toddler and it was really cute–but it has the potential to create pretty tasteless photos, like pictures of Pokemon hanging out at the Holocaust Museum.

Landmarks and museums are covered in PokeStops, but that does not mean that all landmarks are appropriate places to capture Pokemon. The Holocaust Museum in Washignton, D.C., for example, is not an appropriate place to catch Pokemon, and the museum staff probably can’t believe they have to tell people not to catch Pokemon at the Holocaust Museum.

“Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism,” Andrew Hollinger, the museum’s communications director, told The Washington Post‘s Andrea Peterson. “We are trying to find out if we can get the museum excluded from the game.”

According to The Post, the Holocaust Museum actually has three PokeStops on its grounds, which also means players can drop Lure Modules on them to make more Pokemon appear. One Redditor even posted a photo of what appeared to be a poison gas-type Pokemon called a Koffing inside the museum. That post has since been deleted and might have been a hoax, though. I hope it was a hoax, or at least a very unfortunate coincidence. It seems highly unlikely that the game creators would have put a Koffing at the Holocaust Museum on purpose.

It’s hard to imagine that one would catch Pokemon at the Holocaust Museum, but it shouldn’t be surprising, considering that the past few years have seen Instagram trends of selfies at serious places including funerals, selfies at Holocaust memorials, and selfies with homeless people.

Hollinger said capturing Pokemon at the museum seemed disrespectful, especially in the more solemn parts of the memorial. The museum is reportedly trying to see if it can get the PokeStops removed from the grounds so that people will stop trying to catch creatures there.

In the meantime, though, if you must capture Pokemon on top of homeless people, or at funerals or memorials, it’d at least be tasteful to turn off the game’s AR mode, so any pictures just show the Pokemon standing in front of a generic green screen, not on top of a Holocaust memorial or a homeless person’s head.

Update: According to the Associated Press, Arlington National Cemetery would also like people to please stop catching Pokemon there.