Did you play on original PS2? The game was computationally a bit ahead of its time and the hardware wasn't capable enough to run it smoothly. The resulting lag and stuttering could make some really weird things happen, and I remember some people saying if the console was struggling more than usual (overheating etc) it could become impossible to properly play in some areas.

If you still own a copy, try emulating it to on a modern PC instead. PCSX2 does some wild stuff internally and can emulate PS2 code on a modern system faster than it ran on the PS2. SOTC is actually a pretty common performance benchmark. As long as you don't try to use the emulator's graphics upscaling (which increases computational load a ton) it runs much better than on console.