I have had this happen multiple times and it has ruined many of my runs on Haunted Towers because of a softlock bug that requires a level restart. It only happens to me when I speedrun the game. I have never once had it happen during a normal playthrough. I have attached a video of it. Has anyone else experienced this bug? And how should I go about avoiding it?

First note that this isn't a softlock, you can actually run back into the center of the room and then back to the pinwheel gate to make it work correctly.

However, you don't ever need to do that because the situation can be avoided entirely. Simply delay how fast you enter Courtyard from Haunted Towers Entrance. This situation happens if you enter the room before the objective text appears at the top of the screen.

This has happened to me before, I ran around a bit in that same room and came back after looking everywhere and then tried again without resetting and it worked. It may be a problem with how fast you enter the room as it is a speedrun. Tho if it starts spinning that fast clockwise after a second the gate should open, so idk why this happens.

However, you don't ever need to do that because the situation can be avoided entirely. Simply delay how fast you enter Courtyard from Haunted Towers Entrance. This situation happens if you enter the room before the objective text appears at the top of the screen.

I see. I never knew that this is something that could happen. Must've been a bit of a coding oversight from my guess. Or probably a flag that gets set when that specific objective begins and since I entered the room before the objective the flag was never properly set. Regardless, thanks for the reply and I will definitely keep this in mind for future runs!