Once upon a time a widow could not bear the pain of losing her husband, she was mourning day and night by his grave. Nearby, a guard responsible for guarding the corpse of a hanged criminal heard her wailing. Upon finding the widow, he was struck by her beauty and offered his hand in marriage. Meanwhile, the criminal’s corpse was stolen by his fellow culprits, and the punishment awaiting the guard was being hanged. The widow offered to dig out her husband and hang him instead of the corpse. Then the guard remembered that the culprit’s corpse was beardless. Upon the woman’s suggestion, they plucked the beard. The guard was saved and he married the widow, yet there was no comfort to his soul. On his deathbed, he made her promise that she would not torment him by plucking his beard upon his death. This story, aiming at warning men about the deceitful character of women, is one of the Ottoman versions of the well-known tale, the Widow of Ephesus. The tale was in circulation from the first century onwards, and the story has been retold by many, including famous figures such as John of Salisbury and La Fontaine. Its origins and circulation in the Christian and Jewish worlds has been studied, yet the Ottoman versions remain unexamined. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on four different Early Modern Ottoman versions scattered in three different manuscripts and their relation to the existing corpus. An especially apt version for comparison is found in The Book of Delight by the Jewish author Joseph ben Meir Zabara, who lived in Spain in the second half of the twelfth century. What makes the story of literary encounters more exciting is the fact that the earliest known edition of The Book of Delight is found in a volume of works published in Constantinople in 1577. The Ottoman versions and the version in The Book of Delight are remarkable with the emphasis on a motif: plucking the hair/beard of the deceased, hence deceiving and dishonoring him further. This paper concentrates on how the stories and their motives are alike, how they are different, and how they were crafted according to the needs of the narrator and historical context. Accordingly, it aims at contextualizing the Ottoman versions of the Widow of Ephesus in the larger Mediterranean and Islamicate context.