COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho -- Mother, oh God, the Bates Motel is for sale!

The 12-room motel, along with a detached house, is on the market for $250,000.

The seller is not Norman Bates, and this is not the fictional business from Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho."

Rather, it is an old-fashioned motor hotel that coincidentally was called "Bates Motel" when the Hitchcock film came out in 1960.

The owners back then decided they could make a few bucks by linking their business to the fictional motel where a young woman was stabbed to death in the shower by the psychotic proprietor. Subsequent owners continued the link.

"We get quite a few calls from people asking for Norman, and wondering if he'll 'cut them a deal,"' said owner Jodi Powell, a tall blonde who looks a bit like "Psycho" actress Janet Leigh.

Powell's black cat, who leaps onto the front desk to startle strangers, is named Norma. There's a stuffed black bird in the parlor behind the desk.

Night manager Joe Stennet will answer to Norman, although he doesn't really like to.

"I can do a good Charles Manson though," Stennet said, demonstrating.

He also has a "Norman knife."

Like the fictional Bates Motel, this one has 12 small rooms, all opening onto the street.

"We have 12 vacancies; 12 cabins, 12 vacancies," Norman Bates tells eventual victim Marion Crane in the movie.

Unlike the off-the-beaten-path Bates, the real one is just off Interstate 90 in this bustling resort town. It's booked all summer long by tourists, many drawn by the irresistible urge to tell friends they spent the night in the Bates Motel.

"A lot of people see the name and they've got to stop," Stennet said.

Room No. 1, the fictional room in which Crane was stabbed to death, is especially popular with Psycho-tourists, Powell said.

One elderly blind man from Wisconsin stayed in the room for a month a few years ago, Powell said. He warned the owners not to tell his relatives where he was.

"He just recently passed away," Powell said.

The motel offers a Norman special, which is "showers included."

It also sells T-shirts that show the spooky old house from the movie, with a few lighted windows.

The Powells put out plenty of bird seed, to attract ravens, which helps create a forbidding ambiance, she said.

Powell and her husband bought the motel a few years ago and are no longer interested in the business, she said. They do not live there.

"I've got plenty of people interested in the place," said real estate agent Bob Hanson.

The motel was assembled in the 1950s out of some former officers quarters from the closed Farragut Naval Training Center in northern Idaho, a World War II training base.

Rooms rent for $30 to $35 a night, and some come with microwaves and small refrigerators.

None comes with a mummified corpse.