The Lincolnshire Echo website thisislincolnshire.co.uk received more visitors in one day than there are people in Lincoln - after running a story about a controversial cinema poster that's gone up in the city.

Complaints about the film poster, showing a "dead" girl, have now ignited a storm of controversy around the world.

The story appeared on the Echo's website on Saturday and was picked up by quirky news website, Fark, on Monday. Then US columnist Matt Drudge posted the story on his news website - and sent the thisislincoln page views into orbit.

More than 70,000 people viewed the story on the Echo site on Monday and by 9.30am on Wednesday a further 125,000 people - more than the population of Lincoln - had seen it. The site usually gets around 2,000 visitors a day.

Hundreds of people who visited the site wanted to put forward their views about the poster, which appears at a Lincoln bus stop. A deluge of e-mails continues to swamp the Echo's Your View inbox.

The Echo produced a double-page spread using the feedback yesterday, which followed a front page plus two-page spread inside the day before.

Website readers voted overwhelmingly for the poster to stay put - with 82 per cent of people in an online poll saying it shouldn't be banned, and 18 per cent saying it should.

The film is about the dead rising as zombies who try to eat the living. The poster, copies of which are also in Lincoln's Skellingthorpe Road, High Street and Brant Road, shows the face of a zombie girl with piercing eyes.

Mum-of-two Angela Kelly told the Echo she was appalled by a bus shelter advertisement for Dawn of the Dead.

And now her comments are the subject of heated debate from Miami to Hawaii, New York and Texas.

Opinion has been divided between people disgusted by the poster who want it removed and people who believe it is harmless and should stay.

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