It might not be officially available in the UK yet *sigh* but there’s already plenty of strange goings on in the world of Pokémon Go – from drug deals to dead bodies, here’s 5 of the strangest things that have happened to Pokémon Go players so far…
Armed Robbers
What seemed to be an innocent hunt for rare Pokémon turned sour when armed robbers in Missouri used the game’s geo-location feature to lure players to an isolated location, where they promptly robbed them at gunpoint. Pika–nooo!
A Missouri police department spokesperson stated “you can add a beacon to a Pokestop to lure more players. Apparently they were using the app to locate [people] standing around in the middle of a parking lot or whatever other location they were in.”
Luckily the police were able to apprehend the robbers and they were promptly charged with first degree robbery, leaving Missouri’s citizens to continue Pokémoning in relative safety.
Man’s house turned into Pokémon Go Gym
Boon Sheridan’s house became an unlikely Pokémon attraction when it was accidentally identified as a Pokémon Gym.
“Living in an old church means many things,” he wrote on Twitter. “Today it means my house is a Pokemon Go gym. This should be fascinating.”
Pokémon Gyms are usually located in prominent real-world meeting places. They’re visible to players even from a distance and enable Pokémon to fight, hence their popularity – which means Boon regularly finds players loitering outside his house – a scenario which doesn’t look to change anytime soon as you can’t currently remove a location from Pokémon Go unless it poses “immediate physical danger”.
Dead body discovery
Nineteen-year-old Shayla Wiggins, from Wyoming, was innocently trying to track a Pokémon in a natural water source when she unexpectedly came upon a man’s corpse.
“I was walking towards the bridge along the shore when I saw something in the water,” she told County 10 news.
“I had to take a second look and I realised it was a body. It was pretty shocking, I didn’t really know what to do at first. But I called 911 right away and they came really quickly.”
The body was discovered in Big Wind River under the Wyoming Highway 789 Bridge. Police have stated that they don’t suspect foul play.
(Photo: @Hammy_UK, @Daniel_Sloss, @ReversalYouTube)
Pokémon in strange locations
From a Rattata eating cat food to Squirtle on the toilet, players have been reporting Pokémon turning up in some pretty unexpected places.
The Magikarp in particular has become somewhat of a legend – having been seen flopping about in a puddle, sitting by a parked jeep and rather darkly wallowing in a frying pan.
One unlikely Pokémon location – where players can find a Sandshrew in the Darwin police station – has forced the Australian police to start urging players to stop trying to catch it: “For those budding Pokemon Trainers out there using Pokemon Go – whilst the Darwin Police Station may feature as a Pokestop, please be advised that you don’t actually have to step inside in order to gain the pokeballs,” the Northern Territory Police, Fire and Emergency Services wrote on Facebook.
And it’s not just Pokémon, the Hells Angels’ headquarters in New Zealand has seen a plethora of intrepid players turning up in search of free pokeballs.
Drug deal mix-up
One American Pokémoning addict searching at 3am in the morning in his local park (apparently he couldn’t sleep) became an inadvertent suspect in a drug deal.
He states of his adventure in the park: “so I get there and wander around a little checking out the stops and rustling around in the tall grass, then decide to go a few blocks away to see a couple more stops when I hear from the darkness a ‘Yo, my man!”
“Turning, I see two sketchy looking dudes sitting on a bench in the dark. I must have walked right past them without noticing them. One of them waves, ‘My man, check over by the blue truck over there we got an onyx earlier. So I wander over by the truck and sure enough there’s a f—–g Onyx there. Awesome. So I end up chatting with the guys for a bit, told ‘em where I got my Evee, they convinced me to join red team when I hit level five so we could ‘lock s–t down” in the neighbourhood.”
“Then the cop shows up,” he adds.
“Yeah, so it turns out two twenty-something black dudes and a 40-year-old white guy chilling in the park at 3am looks strange. It took a bit of talking to convince the cop we weren’t doing a drug deal, and a bit longer to explain the game. Then the cop downloaded the f—–g game on his phone and asked us how to get started.”
