SEARCHING around for cold spots in total silence, Suzanne Gill may look like a woman possessed - but really she's looking for ghosts.

Once she's found them, she draws salt circles around them and locks them, before banishing them forever.

It may sound like a scene from a horror film, but 46-year-old Suzanne is a real life exorcist.

Despite claiming she's had a sixth sense since she was a child, Suzanne went into a corporate job, becoming a high-flying banker spending hours in the office pouring over numbers.

But she tells Sun Online that after receiving advice from her spirit guide, a native American man called Red Cloud, she left her job and now earns £40,000 a year as a full-time exorcist and medium.

She also has a Facebook page where she regularly runs live ghosts hunts for her 93,000 followers, and has written several books on her craft.

Sun Online spoke to Suzanne about her unusual job, which sees her helping terrified families who have been attacked by ghosts and connecting others with their dead loved ones.

Although Suzanne, who lives in Gateshead with her two children, was doing freelance psychic work on the side of her business banking role, it wasn't until 15 years ago when she quit to become a full-time medium.

"My spirit guides have been watching over me all my life and helping me to make difficult decisions," she says.

“I definitely made the right decision, as the day I quit, I got about 15 phone calls from people needing my services as a medium.”

Now, Suzanne, who claims she has been strangled and dragged across the floor by spirits, spends a lot of her time doing what she calls "house cleanses" - exorcisms that rid homes of "evil" energy.

She currently exorcises around seven houses a month. On average, she charges £30 per exorcism, but will do them for free for troubled families who can't afford to pay.

Luckily, she says she isn't afraid of encountering spirits, and has been meeting other-worldly beings since she was a child.

She recalls: “They always looked so real. The only way the spirits I see differ from living people is that they have a slight glow around them, like Patrick Swayze at the end of Ghost.”

When, aged 15, Suzanne confided in a friend that she had seen ghosts, a friend suggested she tried giving someone a reading to see if she really did possess psychic powers.

Sitting down with a woman who lived locally, she was told by spirits that the lady would soon give birth to a baby girl.

Strongly disagreeing, the woman said she was unable to have any more children.

But, around a year later, she contacted Suzanne again, to tell her she had, indeed, unexpectedly had a daughter.

“That made people realise that I wasn’t just making things up,” Suzanne said.

Not willing to quit her job immediately, Suzanne began to complete her exorcisms around her day-job, hunched over spreadsheets in the day and transforming into a ghost buster at night.

Over time, Suzanne perfected her exorcism skills, resulting in her tried-and-tested methods of ridding evil spirits from homes.

Suzanne explains that in order to cleanse a house, all its occupants must be present, to prevent the spirit from latching on to someone else and returning there once she has gone.

After looking for mysterious cold spots, or calling on her spirit guides for help, she finds what she calls the ghost’s “nest egg” – the main point in the house that activity is happening around.

Suzanne then works through rooms systematically, putting salt around the doors, before closing them to drive the negative energy away.

Eventually, she “seals” the spirit into one room, keeping its doors shut overnight, before returning the next morning and releasing it for good.

Suzanne says the sense of light and warmth that flood the house when an evil spirit has been banished are proof to non-believers that they really do exist.

“I keep in touch with them long afterwards. too. I really focus on that counselling side and put the families first, as it can be such a frightening experience," Suzanne says.

"Sometimes families won't even realise how bad things are until the spirit has gone."

So how do you know whether an evil ghost could be sharing your bed at night?

Suzanne says often the people who contact her for readings or potential exorcisms have been through a period of bad luck, not realising it has been caused by a "malignant spirit".

“When they’re living in haunted houses, families are absorbing this bad entity. They have absolutely no control over their own homes and are suppressed to the point where they can experience health problems, personality changes and even possession," Suzanne says.

“People are sometimes very skeptical of what I do, but I always tell them that, unless you’ve experienced a haunting yourself, you don’t understand.

“How often have people seen something flit past them, out of the corner of their eye and dismissed it as nothing? That’s because they’re not opening their mind and looking at it more deeply.

“Loads of the people that come to me for help used to be skeptics, until it happened to them.”

One of the scariest incidents Suzanne has ever witnessed was in a pub called The Wheatsheaf in 2004 - made famous by tales that it was the site of a murder in the 1900s.

"As soon as I stepped inside, I felt a fear like nothing else. When I went to the toilet I heard a little girl say she was buried alive in the walls," Suzanne reveals.

Filled with a sense that something terrible had happened in the building, Suzanne was further terrified when she later discovered a vertebrae bone.

Other remains were later found in a fireplace - including a lock of hair and the heel of a shoe.

Suzanne claims she later discovered the girl's spooky voice had been that of local girl Jessica Ann-Hargreaves, who she says was murdered by a worker named Joseph Lawrence in 1908.

"Jessica was communicating with me. She'd been strangled and raped. He cut her up and trampled on her in the cellar," Suzanne said at the time.

"He tried to get rid of all the evidence by throwing all of her clothes and belongings into a bog fireplace."

Yet despite her terrifying encounters, Suzanne believes most spirits have lost their way and need her help to reach the other side.

A person may angry because they died very quickly, or they may not understand that they are dead and need to speak to somebody.

“The little girl at the Wheatsheaf was screaming out for help and needed her voice to be heard so she could cross to the other side. She’s in peace now. It’s a beautiful thing to know I set her free."