A human skeleton found in California’s Sierra Mountains in October has turned out to be the remains of a Japanese-American detained at a World War II-era internment camp, officials said Friday.

Giichi Matsumura died in the war’s waning days when he was caught in a freak summer snowstorm while hiking with a group from the Manzanar camp.

By that time, detainees were free to leave the facility if they chose – but many families, like Matsumura’s, had no businesses or homes to return to, so they remained.

A search party from the camp found his body weeks later but could not transport it back to his distraught family. Instead, they dug a shallow grave and covered Matsumura’s remains with granite stones.

He became known as “the ghost of Manzanar” to family members, granddaughter Lori Matsumura said.

“It was a bit of a rediscovery,” she told The Associated Press. “We knew where he was approximately.”

The Inyo County sheriff’s office used Lori’s DNA to make a positive identification after a pair of hikers stumbled across the 74-year-old bones on Oct. 7.