One evening around 2001/2002 I was walking my dog over Cannock Chase when I had my second experience, I had decided to try a different route for once so parked up off of Camp Road on a public car-park and walked down past some heathland and down to the stream that runs through part of the Forest. As it was still quite light I decided to walk along the stream to a crossing area known as the stepping stones. It was a reasonable evening with clear sky's and a decent temperature
As we walked along the trail following the stream we got to within sight of the crossing and my dog, who was out in front, stopped dead in its tracked and stood very still. As I caught up to my dog I fussed his head and started to walk past him, telling him to come with me, I went about 6 foot past the dog before I realised he had not followed. So I yet again told him to come and he refused, this was very unusually as he was a very obedient dog and did as he was told. I looked around but there was nothing I could see that would make the dog act the way he was. This is marked as "Second Experience" on the map below.
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As the dog refused to go down the trail I opted to backtrack up the trail to the car-park. So I walked back past the dog and up the trail calling the dog to follow, the dog followed me but was constantly walking back around me and looking back down the trail like he was watching something behind me. I turned around and could still see nothing out of the ordinary, so I just carried on walking back up the trail and kept calling the dog to me. We had gone maybe 500 yards up the the trail when I saw the dogs hackles rise, this made me stop and become very still and watchful, but again I could neither see or hear anything strange.
The way the dog was acting had started to get me worried, I had seen a large Cat before over the chase and the way the dog was acting was like something was watching/following us. It was getting on to-wards dusk and we were down by the stream that the deer would go to and cross over. So putting all this together I had to assume that the Big Cat was close and that was what the dog could sense/hear.
It was at this point that I opted to walk up a trail back to-wards the road and away from the stream, so I walked along the trail till the next trail going to-wards the road and took that trail back to the road. Once we had walked halfway back to-wards the road and got well clear of the stream the dog went back to acting normal, just as if the danger had passed us by and we were safe again.
Many times as my dog and I was walking over Cannock Chase the dog would refuse to go down certain trails and sections of the Chase, again this was mainly in areas that we had seen deer in and was close to water. We often had to take detours around areas to get back to the car. The dog was friendly and got on well with other dogs and people. He wasn't even bothered if we was close to Deer, he would stand still and wait for me to catch him up before moving off. The way he behaved suggested to me the dog must have been scared of something or was protecting me by not putting me in harms way.
The dog was a boxer/collie cross and was quite large, which made me wonder what would scare a dog that big. I would assume that only something larger and unfriendly or something that had hurt them before. As I had had this dog from when he was a puppy you could remove him being hurt by something as he hadn't been hurt at all. So every-time the dog refused to go down a trail/path I had to assume that there was something bigger that worried him.
I never saw anything but a few times I had seen bushes and smaller trees swaying as if something had brushed past them, as for sounds yes I had heard some low level coughs but nothing I could 100% say was an animal making a noise.