Jure Grando, recorded by Johann Weikhard von Valvasor as Georg or Giure Grando, lived in Kringa, a settlement in the Istrian peninsula of what is now Croatia. According to Valvasor's account, Grando died in 1656 and was buried by a priest named Giorgio. The story does not survive as a contemporary record from the year of Grando's death; its principal written source is Valvasor's The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, published in 1689. Valvasor nevertheless stated that the account was based on information obtained from people who had been present during the events.

In the terminology preserved by Valvasor, Grando was described as a štrigon, a regional term associated with a sorcerer, witch-like figure, or dangerous revenant. The term should not automatically be treated as identical to the standardized vampire concept that became widespread in European literature during the eighteenth century. The Grando account is nevertheless important because many of its motifs, including a dead person returning physically from the grave, attacking the living, resisting attempted destruction, and being neutralized through treatment of the corpse, later became familiar features of European vampire traditions.

According to the story, the priest who had buried Grando later encountered the deceased after visiting the surviving spouse's home. The dead person subsequently was said to walk through Kringa at night and knock on doors. Residents reportedly believed that someone living in a house visited in this way would die soon afterward. These disturbances were said to continue intermittently over the sixteen years between Grando's death in 1656 and the final confrontation in 1672.

The account also states that Grando repeatedly visited the surviving spouse. Valvasor's description is considerably more severe than some sanitized later retellings: the source represents the visits as sexual assaults rather than merely frightening apparitions at the bedside. The surviving spouse eventually appealed to the local headman, Miho Radetić, for protection. This element became one of several features portraying the returning dead person as a physically active revenant rather than an insubstantial apparition.

In 1672, Radetić organized a group of villagers to confront the supposed revenant. Nine people reportedly went to the cemetery carrying two lamps or torches, a crucifix, and a hawthorn stake. When the grave was opened, Valvasor's account describes Grando's face as unusually red and the corpse as apparently preserved, with its mouth open in what the witnesses interpreted as laughter. The initial sight reportedly frightened the group enough that the participants withdrew before being persuaded to return.

The villagers first attempted to destroy the corpse by piercing the body with the hawthorn stake. According to Valvasor, the attempt failed because the stake would not penetrate the body. Religious prayers and an attempted exorcism accompanied the effort to destroy the supposed revenant. These details belong to the reported seventeenth-century episode and document the methods the participants believed were necessary to neutralize the dead person; the account does not provide independent evidence that the corpse possessed supernatural resistance.

After the attempted staking failed, one member of the group reportedly used a cutting tool to decapitate the corpse. Valvasor's account states that blood flowed when the head was removed and attributes sounds and bodily reactions to the corpse during the procedure. The reported disturbances were said to cease after the decapitation. These observations later became especially dramatic components of the Grando legend, but they survive through Valvasor's account rather than through medical or forensic documentation produced during the exhumation itself.

Modern understanding of decomposition provides natural mechanisms capable of accounting for some physical features that historical observers interpreted as evidence of revenant activity. Rates of decay can vary substantially according to burial environment, temperature, moisture, body composition, and other conditions, while postmortem fluids can be released when a body is pierced or cut. Such mechanisms provide plausible explanations for preserved appearance or apparent bleeding without requiring supernatural activity. They do not, however, independently reconstruct every detail described in the Valvasor narrative.

The historical importance of the Jure Grando Vampire Case lies partly in its date. The alleged events ending in 1672 predate the famous Petar Blagojević Vampire Case of 1725 and the Medveđa Vampire Panic of 1731–1732, both of which subsequently involved Habsburg administrative or medical officials and helped bring Balkan vampire traditions to wider European attention. The Grando story therefore preserves an earlier form of the regional revenant tradition before the eighteenth-century vampire controversy generated its better-known official reports.

At the same time, the nature of the evidence differs substantially from the later Serbian cases. Frombald's Kisiljevo report and the 1732 Visum et Repertum were produced in connection with official investigations close to the events they described. The Grando narrative instead survives principally through Valvasor's account published seventeen years after the alleged destruction of the corpse. This makes the Jure Grando Vampire Case historically significant while also requiring greater caution about the precision of individual details.

The case is therefore best understood as an unusually early and influential documented revenant tradition whose principal source records what witnesses reportedly believed had occurred rather than providing contemporary forensic verification. The existence of Valvasor's 1689 account is secure; whether every episode described within it occurred precisely as reported cannot now be established. Distinguishing that well-documented literary and folkloric record from the supernatural interpretation allows the Grando story to retain its historical importance without requiring the archive either to authenticate or dismiss the extraordinary claims.