Jure Grando: The world’s first recorded vampire
Hear me out here, but just because something is fictional, it doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.
Take the legend of the banshee, for example. The story of wailing, ghostly women haunting people who’ve just suffered a horrible loss is one that has followed Irish culture for centuries. However, if one has ever been unlucky enough to hear a fox scream in their back garden at three in the morning, one can easily believe that it comes from something beyond the grave. Combine that with the myriad hardships that Irish people have had to deal with for those centuries…well, let’s just say that there was no shortage of people who would have heard that just before suffering a horrible loss.
As much as I want to believe in mythological creatures like ghosts, faeries and the like, I think it’s just as interesting to read them not as literal documents of what happened to people but something more expressionist. They’re stories, told from community to community as a way of getting certain lessons stuck in people’s minds. We don’t believe that George Lucas wants us to believe in Jedi, The Empire and Luke Skywalker, but the importance of fighting back against imperialism? Now that’s something worth bearing in mind.
Of course, there are some cases where one must shrug their shoulders and go “nah, that was just someone doing some very strange shit” and accept that some people really do just want to act like creatures of the night. For more proof, look no further than Jure Grando. A native of Istria, the country we would now call Croatia, who is the first person to ever be described as a vampire in official, historical records?
Why was Jure Grando called a vampire?
I’d brace yourself for this, because it’s a rough one.
Grando was a stonemason who lived and died in the village of Kringa from 1578 to 1656. He was survived by his wife and two children upon his death from an unknown illness, and his wife and family were ready to move on until chilling events started happening shortly after he was buried. Late at night, another villager received a knock on their front door and talked idly about it disturbing their sleep the following morning. Mere days later, they were dead.
A few years after that, another villager complained of an unknown visitor knocking on their door in the dead of night. A few days on from then, they were dead. Then another. Then another. Dead villagers began piling up, all having the same late-night encounter. People began beseeching the parish priest Father Giorgio for help before the most disturbing testimony of all came from Grando’s widow, Ivana. A figure had appeared in her bedroom, smiling and gasping for breath. The figure was her deceased husband, Jure, who proceeded to sexually assault her.
The town was in uproar over this and demanded that Father Giorgio do something about this vampire. Eventually, Giorgio led a group of villagers to Jore’s grave. According to legend, when they dug his grave, he was perfectly preserved and grinning. After a few failed attempts to stake his heart, another villager took a hacksaw to Jore’s neck. According to legend, the moment the villager cut into Grando, who had been dead 16 years by this point, he screamed out loud. The deaths ended immediately after Grando’s decapitation.
Which leads to the truly horrifying conclusion. Some evil, evil person really wanted his community to think that his actions were actually those of a vampire.