Poor Guy’s Home Is Accidentally Turned Into A Pokémon GO Gym, All Hell Breaks Loose

Boon Sheridan, a designer living in Massachusetts, US, with his wife and two cats, woke up yesterday to a strange discovery.

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His home has become a “gym” for the new augmented reality mobile game, Pokémon GO.

Originally a church in the 1800’s, Boon’s house shed its status as a place of worship more than 40 years ago.

Last year, the family moved into a lovely home that was originally built as a church in the 1800s.

Apparently Google missed this memo, or used a reaaaally old map for reference.

Before making this old church their home, Boon and his wife used to live in an apartment converted from a convenience store. Needless to say, they’re very particular with their choice of architecture: it has to be really unusual.

But this probably is not the kind of unusual they signed up for — the past few days, the Sheridan family have been getting visitors lurking outside their house.

On his last count, Boon says more than 50 people have walked up to his house and as many cars have pulled up in front of his driveway. His visitors spend around 5-10 minutes just standing there, head down, probably trying to train a Squirtle.

The owner of the house even met the “owner” of the Pokémon gym.

A lot of the designated “gyms” and Pokéstops in the game are churches or cemeteries, which is probably why the Sheridan home was chosen.

Although Pokémon is an augmented reality game, there may be real-world repercussions to all this unwanted attention.

With people coming by as late as 11:30 in the evening, Boon decided to see whether he can request to have the gym status of his house changed. He logged on to the official website of Niantic, the company that designed and released the game, to read the terms of having his place removed from the Poké-map.

But apparently, that’s impossible.

Which is crazy, since some locations get hundreds of Pokémon GO players visiting at a time.

To top it off, Niantic offers no specific reminders to players regarding trespassing in private property, despite creating Pokémon-collecting locations around some private residences.

“The only real reference in the Pokémon GO Trainer guidelines is, ‘Adhere to the rules of the human world,'” says Boon. “That’s a slippery phrase if I’ve ever heard one.”

Despite being live for only a few days so far, Pokémon GO has very quickly taken over the lives of many people who have downloaded the game on their mobiles.

One of them was Boon — which is how he found out his house was a gym in the first place.

Standup guy Boon still manages to keep his sense of humor despite what’s happening.

Thankfully, some good has come out of all this hullaballoo.

It doesn’t really make up for having your house invaded by the nerdiest adults within the vicinity, but hey, it’s something.