Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova was born in 1911 in Strumica, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now in North Macedonia. Accounts of her early life vary, but most biographies describe a relatively ordinary rural childhood before an event during adolescence that later became central to her life story.

According to the commonly repeated account, Vanga was caught in a violent storm or whirlwind that threw her into a field and left her eyes filled with sand and debris. Her eyesight subsequently deteriorated and she became blind. The episode is an important part of her traditional biography, but contemporary meteorological records or independent accounts confirming the extraordinary storm narrative have not been established. Later biographies nevertheless treated the loss of her sight as a turning point after which claims of unusual perception and foreknowledge became associated with her.

By the Second World War era, Vanga had developed a growing reputation as a healer, clairvoyant, and source of information about missing or absent people. Visitors traveled to consult her about relatives, illnesses, wartime uncertainty, and personal problems. Over subsequent decades her reputation expanded throughout Bulgaria and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, with accounts describing consultations by ordinary citizens as well as prominent political and cultural figures.

Vanga occupied an unusual position during Bulgaria's communist period. The state's official ideology rejected religion, occultism, and supernatural belief, yet public interest in her persisted and her activities attracted journalists, researchers, officials, and other observers. This attention documents the scale of her reputation and the social phenomenon surrounding her, but it does not itself establish the paranormal explanations attributed to her abilities.

In later life Vanga became closely associated with Rupite, an area near Petrich characterized by volcanic geology and thermal springs. She attached spiritual significance to the location and spent her later years there. She also supported the construction of the St. Petka Bulgarian memorial church at Rupite, established in 1994 with funding she provided. The church, her house, and her grave later became important components of the public and commemorative landscape associated with her life.

The most difficult part of the Baba Vanga record concerns her alleged predictions. Thousands of consultations and statements have been attributed to her, but establishing precisely what she said, when she said it, and how faithfully it was preserved is difficult. Many famous predictions now circulating under her name appear in secondary or posthumous accounts rather than authenticated records created before the predicted events. Translation, paraphrase, retrospective interpretation, and repeated media retellings further complicate attempts to distinguish documented statements from later additions.

This does not erase Vanga's historical importance. Contemporary reporting and the scale of visitation surrounding her demonstrate that she had acquired a significant reputation during her own lifetime, rather than becoming famous only after her death. What remains unresolved is how much of the enormous prophetic catalog now attributed to her can be traced to statements reliably documented before the events they supposedly predicted.

Baba Vanga died in 1996. Since then, her reputation has continued to expand through books, documentaries, news coverage, websites, and annually circulating prediction lists. Regardless of whether her reported abilities are interpreted as paranormal, psychological, folkloric, or cultural, Vanga remains one of the most influential prophetic figures of modern Eastern European folklore.