On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, a customer was sitting on the steps of Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, waiting for the branch to open, when an atomic bomb exploded over the city. The bank was only 260 meters from ground zero, and as the intense heat burned its stone face white, the customer’s body shielded one section of the steps, leaving a “shadow” in that place.

The steps are now preserved in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

In 1946, the British mission to Hiroshima and Nagasaki noted that the surfaces of asphalt roads “retained the ‘shadows’ of those who had walked there at the instant of the explosion.” It called them “objects of macabre interest and pilgrimage for visitors.”