Berkeley has Chisel where you write something like C + Scala and you get Verilog for hardware instantiation and C for verification https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/

It actually is just Scala. The whole thing is a Scala DSL.

I thought you could write some modules in C

I suppose you could, in practice, write modules for simulation in C or C++ and hook it up to the C++ code that the compiler generates. I doubt this is very useful in practice since you can't generate any Verilog from it.