Nginx not running, but listening on port 80

I am unable to do service nginx start due to:

nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use)

But if I then do service nginx status I get:

 * nginx is not running

This is with nginx 1.8 on ubuntu 14.04, and using stop does not work (as it doesn't think it is running)

I know I can just kill the process running on that port, but I need a more graceful way to fix the problem.

I have confirmed that it is nginx listening on port 80 using netstat -tulpn

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      9787/nginx.conf 

When running sudo /usr/sbin/nginx -s reload

nginx: [error] open() "/run/nginx.pid" failed (2: No such file or directory)

I am using AWS OpsWorks (Chef) to manage the infrastructure.
To install nginx I am using the https://github.com/miketheman/nginx/tree/2.7.x cookbook, and installing via the repo. Run list = [nginx::repo, nginx::default]

The first time boot works absolutely fine, but a subsequent setup call causes a setup failure.

Results from ps aux | grep nginx

root      9791  0.0  0.0  31504  2184 ?        Ss   10:12   0:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
www-data 14571  0.0  0.0  32036  1976 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process                   
www-data 14572  0.0  0.0  32036  2224 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process                   
www-data 14573  0.0  0.0  32036  1976 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process                   
www-data 14574  0.0  0.0  32036  1976 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process                   
www-data 14575  0.0  0.0  32036  1976 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process                   
www-data 14576  0.0  0.0  32036  1976 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process                   
www-data 14577  0.0  0.0  32036  1976 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process                   
www-data 14578  0.0  0.0  32036  1976 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process                   
www-data 14579  0.0  0.0  32036  1976 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process                   
www-data 14580  0.0  0.0  32036  1976 ?        S    10:13   0:00 nginx: worker process    

If I run echo '9791' | sudo tee /run/nginx.pid nginx reports that is now running. Previously the pid file was empty.

So the root problem appears to be that the pid file is getting truncated.